The Forsaken
by Ingebjorg9
Summary: When the body of an unknown girl is discovered Wallander and his team begin to believe that something very sinister has been happening. However, the truth is much bigger and darker than they were expecting. Can they stop the same happening again?
1. Chapter 1: Discovery

The Forsaken

A Kurt Wallander story

When the body of an unknown girl is discovered Wallander and his team begin believe that something very unpleasant has been happening to her. However, the truth is much bigger and darker than even they were expecting. Please review: comments and suggestions are always welcome :)

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Kurt Wallander, or any of his colleagues, I've just borrowed them from Henning Mankell, whose skill and genius created them.

* * *

_Chapter 1: Discovery_

Stefan put his foot to the floor and accelerated hard up the empty winding road. The speed and the g-forces made his heart pound; it was the first time in weeks that he had felt really alive, wrestling his car round corners with his favourite music blasting from the speakers. The call-out along the lonely rural road and the excuse to get away from the station and drive wildly were just what he had been waiting for.

He slammed the car to a halt and the music died with the cutting out of the engine. He had arrived. An abandoned caravan, he had been told. Well, it certainly was. And somebody had indeed tried to set it on fire. He pulled at the charred door to see if it would open. It fell away in his hand and he was left staring into the gloomy space inside. There wasn't much in there: bedding, a few old magazines, some grotty-looking clothes. He put the door back and moved to the rear of the caravan. The number plate was gone. It was going to be hard to trace who had left this thing sitting here.

Stefan scowled to himself. This was not what he had joined the police for. He wanted to track down scum like murderers and rapists and get them off the streets, not impound derelict caravans. He sighed, glancing one more inside the vehicle to see if there was anything he had missed. This time his eyes fastened onto a small glinting object on the floor. Curious, he leaned inside and picked it up. It was a small gold ring with a red stone.

He was examining the ring, looking for an inscription or some clue to its owner's identity, when his phone rang. He answered, with little interest.

"Stefan? Where are you?" It was Wallander. There was a sharp, urgent tone to his voice that told Stefan something serious had happened.

"You know where I am. I'm checking out that abandoned caravan."

"Well, I need you back in town immediately. There's been a murder: a young girl."

Stefan shuddered.

"I'll be there as soon as I can." He hung up and put the phone in his pocket. He took one more look at the ring, then placed it carefully in the secure pocket inside his jacket.

* * *

The yard behind the bar was unusually crowded, with police, forensic officers and gawping bar staff all jostling for position. Wallander shivered in the frigid air as he watched Nyberg and his team busy themselves with the crime scene. The young woman who had discovered the body during her cigarette break was being calmed down by a female uniformed officer, and the bar's owner had been called. Everything so far was under control. Only the unsavoury task of finding what had happened, and to whom, remained.

Nyberg beckoned him over, and he threaded his way through the crowd in the yard.

"Come on, move these people out of here," he shouted to a pair of uniformed officers who appeared to be treating the incident as an excuse to stand around smoking and chatting. They nodded and began to shepherd the still gawping bar staff back into the building.

Wallander reached Nyberg's side.

"What have you found?"

"See for yourself."

Wallander looked down at the young woman whose body lay at his feet. He was taken aback at how little space she took up. She was painfully, jaggedly thin and wearing very little, with only a short vest and a minute pair of shorts to cover her sparse frame. Her body was liberally covered with bruises of varying sizes and shapes and there was a gash on her forehead, half-hidden under her pale blonde hair. For a minute or two he was utterly speechless.

"As you can see, she's been beaten," said Nyberg. "Some of those are old bruises, so I reckon the beating wasn't a one-off." Nyberg's face contorted in disgust.

"Was that what killed her?" ventured Wallander.

"Maybe. Although I wouldn't rule out hypothermia either. You can see how little she's wearing, and it was damn cold last night."

"Mmmm, I know. Get her to the morgue, then. Let me know if you find anything at all useful around this place." He moved away. He always hated cases like this, when the victim was so young and vulnerable. He shivered again, not entirely because of the cold, and was glad of the distraction when Stefan appeared.

"What's happened?"

"We have a dead teenage girl, Stefan."

"A teenager? When you said 'young girl' I thought…"

"Yes, I know. It's not quite as bad as that, but bad enough, Stefan. Bad enough."

"Do we know who she was?"

"Not yet." Wallander couldn't keep the note of regret out of his voice. Stefan looked at him sharply, noticing how his boss seemed to have aged ten years since that morning. The two men walked through the yard and into the back of the bar, which was dark and cavernous.

Their conversation was interrupted by the bar's owner, who had just arrived from Malmö.

"What the hell is going on?" he demanded. "They said I'll have to shut the bar. I can't shut the bar. Do you know how much money I'll lose if I don't open tonight?"

Wallander gave the man a hard stare.

"This bar is a crime scene. A girl has been found dead and until we finish with the scene of the crime, the bar will stay shut. I hope I've made myself clear, Mr…?"

"…Bergman. Arne Bergman."

"Mr Bergman. Things will of course move more quickly if we have your full co-operation. Otherwise, we may have to investigate the validity of your license…" Wallander left the threat hanging between them.

"Of course," Bergman backed down hastily. "I'll be glad to do anything I can to help. Of course I will."

"Good. The first thing you can do is let us speak to everyone who was here last night and this morning."

* * *

Wallander studied the photograph intently. It was not a pleasant photo. In the picture was a pale-skinned girl lying on a mortuary slab. She looked as if she were sleeping, but the sleep was not peaceful.

He held the picture under a desk lamp where the light was better. It was so late that everyone else had gone home and only the duty staff were still in the station. It was ink-dark outside, and inside didn't seem much brighter. The clock on the wall said 11:47 pm. Wallander desperately wanted to go home, to fall into bed and sleep, but found himself preoccupied with this still-unidentified victim. She didn't match anyone on the missing persons register and they had found absolutely no identification on her body. She troubled him.

"Who are you?" he asked her. "What happened to you? What has gone so badly wrong in your life that you end up beaten and bruised and dead in that bar's back yard?"

He hadn't realised that he had spoken out loud until he heard Stefan's voice behind him.

"Isn't that the first sign of madness?"

He looked up to see his younger colleague standing by the door, looking grave and amused all at once.

"Stefan? What are you doing still hanging round here?"

"I had to finish talking to all those people from the bar." Stefan sat heavily at his desk, rubbing his face. "They're idiots, all of them. Couldn't even agree on who had been doing what and where at the time that girl found the body. We need to speak to them again; we still haven't got everything pinned down."

"You look tired Stefan. Go home. This mess will still be here in the morning."

Stefan gave him a quiet snigger.

"Says the man who practically lives in his office," he said, good-naturedly.

"Not tonight though. I _will_ find out who this young woman was, but that can also wait until tomorrow."

Wallander tacked the photograph to the whiteboard, giving it one last thoughtful stare, then the two men walked out of the building, leaving the room in silence and darkness.


	2. Chapter 2: Who Are You?

_Chapter 2: Who Are You?_

Ever since she was a little girl, Linda had always hated Thursdays. She wasn't sure why, but it felt as if it was something to do with Thursday being past the middle of the week but without having the fun and sense of anticipation of a Friday. By Thursday she was always tired and the weekend still felt like a long way off. In her experience, unpleasant things also had a habit of happening on a Thursday. This was no exception, and as she sat in the briefing room with her father, Stefan and Nyberg, examining the scant evidence surrounding the death of an unknown girl who had clearly been brutalised, she wished she could go home and get back into bed. Murder investigations were never pleasant, but Linda found this one particularly distasteful.

"We found very little evidence in the yard," Nyberg was saying. "However, it seems she was there for quite a while. As to exactly how she died, we're still waiting for the pathologist to get back to us."

"So we're still not sure if the beating was the cause of death?" Wallander questioned.

"If it was, she certainly wasn't beaten up in that yard. There would be signs of a disturbance and traces of blood."

"What was she doing in there anyway?" Stefan interjected.

Linda looked up, and gazed round at the three men.

"It's pretty obvious," she said. "She was hiding."

"Yes," said Wallander, slowly and quietly. "Yes, she was hiding. I wonder, who was she hiding from?"

"Whoever it was that beat her," said Stefan. Nyberg gave a suppressed snort of laughter at the obviousness of the suggestion.

"It would be odd if she didn't try to hide from him," he muttered. Stefan looked irritated. Wallander could see that this was heading nowhere and tried to bring the discussion back on track.

"Look, first of all we establish who the victim was, yes?" Everyone nodded in agreement. "Then when we know that, we might have some idea of who did this to her, why she died."

Linda reached for the picture of the girl taken at the crime scene and gazed at it for a few moments.

"Was this all she was wearing?"

"Yes. The poor kid must have been frozen," Nyberg sighed.

"She's not even wearing shoes. She can't have come very far if she was barefoot."

"That's true…" Wallander took the picture and stared at it. "Linda, I want you to speak to the neighbours. Visit as many of the people who live in the vicinity of the bar as possible, and find out if any of them ever saw this girl. Nyberg, you continue analysing the girl's clothes. I'm going to visit the pathologist."

"What about me?" protested Stefan.

"I want you to go with Linda. Unless of course you want to write up the paperwork for that caravan from yesterday."

"No thanks," said Stefan, getting up. "Come on," he said to Linda. "We'll take my car."

* * *

"Are you okay?"

They had been driving for five minutes and Linda had not said a word. She sat tensely in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. Stefan found the silence awkward.

"Hmm? Oh, yes I'm fine." Linda sighed, distractedly.

"Case getting to you? Kurt's the same. I found him talking to a photo last night."

Linda gave him a weak smile, then lapsed back into her sombre expression.

"I don't like this at all," she said.

"Nobody does. She was just a kid."

"I know, but it's not just that. Something _really_ bad happened to her, I know it. She's been abused – _really abused_ – by someone. I guess I'm worried about what we're going to find."

Stefan shot her a glance. She's serious, he thought. And she's probably right. This was one of those times where he didn't doubt her intuition one bit.

* * *

Wallander stood patiently at the door, waiting for Karin Linder to finish up and come out to him. He watched through the glass panel as her assistants gently pulled a sheet over the girl's head. Much as he disliked visiting the morgue, he found the scene inside the spotless white room calm and dignified. Perhaps in death the young girl on the slab was being given the kind of respect and care she hadn't received in life.

Presently, Karin finished scrubbing down and came to the door, shutting it quietly behind her.

"Well?" Wallander was eager for information, anything at all would do.

"The report won't be ready till tomorrow," said Karin. "We'll also have to do a dental record search to see if we can put a name to the face. But I can tell you that whoever she was, the last year or two of her life was pretty miserable."

"The injuries?"

"Yes, she'd been beaten numerous times. She's covered in bruises: some old, some new. She also has several scars, including that gash above her eye. And at some point she broke her left wrist. She's also been starved, which has made it harder for us to judge her age, but we think she was about 17 years old."

Wallander shook his head, slowly and silently. It didn't matter how many violent crimes he investigated, he never ceased to be amazed and disgusted by how brutal humans could be to each other.

"Were there any signs of sexual activity?" He didn't really want to ask, but the question had to be raised.

Karin nodded.

"Yes. We've found some traces that might be able to get a decent DNA sample from. And there was another thing…" She hesitated.

"Yes?" said Wallander impatiently.

"At some point in the last couple of years she's been pregnant. From the scarring it looks like she miscarried during the first trimester."

"I see," said Wallander thoughtfully. He sighed. "I don't suppose there's much hope of finding any hospital records for her. What did she actually die of in the end?"

"Hypothermia."

Wallander nodded. He could see that Linda had been right. The girl had been hiding from… someone. Someone who had mistreated her in horrific ways, someone who terrified her so much that she had taken refuge in that yard on one of the coldest nights of the year and frozen to death.

He thanked Karin and went back to his office, where he gazed long and hard at the girl's photo.

"I will find who did this to you," he promised her. "I'll find him and I'll see to it that he gets what he deserves."

* * *

It was lunchtime when Stefan and Linda returned to the station. From his office, Wallander watched them come in and sit at their desks. They appeared to be having some kind of disagreement: Stefan was looking decidedly animated and Linda had the impatient expression she always got when she didn't agree with someone. Wallander didn't care what it was about, as long as it was related to the case. He went to the door and looked out.

"Stefan. Linda."

They both looked up at him.

"Did you find anything useful?"

Stefan shot a glance at Linda.

"Maybe," he said.

"Definitely," she countered.

"You don't know for sure!" Stefan threw a hand in the air, in apparent exasperation.

"Why can't you trust me on this one? I've heard of stuff like this before, and if it's what I think it is, it's really horrible."

"And what do you think it is?" Wallander fixed his gaze intently on his daughter. She stared back at him.

"Prostitution. Possibly under-age as well."

"I think you two had better come in my office and tell me exactly what you found out."

Grim-faced, they followed him into the office and recounted their morning's work.

As it turned out, several of the neighbours recognised the girl in the picture, although nobody had any idea who she actually was. She had occasionally been seen in the neighbourhood, often accompanied by one of two or three large, tough-looking men, or sometimes with another girl, who appeared to be in a similarly under-fed state. The girls, when seen in public, always looked miserable and seemed nervous. They never spoke to or initiated contact with their neighbours. One of the neighbours had pointed out the flat where he thought the girls had been staying. Stefan and Linda had rung the doorbell, but got no answer. The place appeared run-down and the door had been kicked in at least once and hastily repaired with chipboard. The whole thing had given Linda an uncomfortable feeling. Stefan hadn't liked the look of it either, despite his protestations.

Wallander listened carefully to their report, occasionally making a note on one of the many scraps of paper on his desk. When the story was finished he rested his chin on his hands and thought for a minute. Linda and Stefan looked at each other, but neither of them wanted to interrupt Wallander's train of thought. Finally he spoke.

"I think, Linda, that you might be on to something. We don't want to believe that such things could be happening on our doorstep, but the pattern could fit, especially given the medical evidence." He repeated what Karin had told him that morning. As he spoke he could see Linda shaking her head every so often in disgust. Stefan was perfectly still, his eyes fixed to a spot on the floor until Wallander finished, then his gaze snapped back to his boss.

"What do you want to do about it then?" he asked. "If this is true, then there are other girls involved. They could be at risk."

"Yes, it's quite likely," Wallander admitted. "I want to see this flat for myself and see if I can speak to whoever lives there, if anyone does live there now. Linda, I want you to come with me. Stefan, write up everything you and Linda have told me, then do some digging and find out who owns that flat."

Linda drove her father down to the flat that she and Stefan had visited that morning.

"I don't like this," Wallander said as they drove. Linda looked over at him with a sort of half-smile.

"I said the same thing to Stefan," she said. "But it's not like you to let a case get to you."

"Many cases get to me," he replied. "But there's something about this one that I can't seem to shake off."

"I think I know what you mean."

"The problem is, the girl reminds me of you in some ways."

"Me? How?" Linda was trying hard not to let the jolt of disbelief she was feeling distract her from the road ahead.

"She looks a little bit like you. Then when I look at her picture it forces me to ask myself what I would do if it was you in her position." He glanced out the window to avoid looking at her. "It's not a nice thought, as you can imagine."

By now they had reached their destination. Linda turned off the engine and looked at her father.

"Dad."

"Yes?"

"It's okay. I'm not lying on a slab like that girl. I'm here. I'm fine. You don't have to keep imagining all these worst-case scenarios any more; I'm a big girl now."

"Yes, I know," Wallander smiled. "But dads never stop fussing about their daughters, you know?" She giggled.

"Don't I know it!"

Their mood lightened, they prepared to meet the occupants of the flat.


	3. Chapter 3: Soup and Cyrillic

_Chapter 3: Soup and Cyrillic_

Stefan sighed as he sat at his computer and began typing. He could understand why Wallander had taken Linda with him: if there were other young women in that flat they would be more likely to talk to her than to him. But still, he would rather be out doing something than writing reports.

He typed quickly and emailed copies of the finished report to Linda, Wallander and the other officers who were on the case. He hesitated at sending a copy to Holgersson. Sooner or later she would probably pull Wallander in for a meeting, no doubt to challenge the necessity of diverting so many resources into the investigation of one girl's death. It was beginning to look less like murder now, and more like a side-effect of something that was almost as ugly. Stefan fervently hoped that Linda's theory was wrong, but was steeling himself for the outcome of the investigation. And right now he wasn't in the mood to provoke Holgersson. Let Kurt handle her.

Svartman wandered past, tapping him on the shoulder.

"Had lunch?"

"Nope."

"I'm on my way out. Do you want me to get you something?"

Stefan realised then how empty his stomach was. He nodded, closing down his email program.

"I'll get you some soup, then," said Svartman, heading for the door.

"Fine," mumbled Stefan, opening a database and typing in a query. He raised his head to ask Svartman a question and realised too late that the other man had gone. He sighed to himself and looked up a phone number.

Three quarters of an hour later, he had the name that was on the title deeds of the flat. Lasse Hallström. He drank down the pea soup that Svartman had brought back for him and gazed at the fax in front of him, lost in thought.

* * *

Meanwhile, Wallander and Linda had been to the flat in search of life.

Wallander knocked sharply on the shoddily-repaired door and they waited. It was another icy day, with no sign that winter was releasing its grip on Skåne. A thin wind blew through the streets of Ystad, carrying the threat of snow. The corner on which the ground-floor flat stood seemed particularly cold, and Wallander and Linda shivered as they waited for an answer from within.

Nobody answered the knock. Wallander tapped on the door again. Again nothing. The two looked at each other questioningly, until Wallander gestured to his daughter. Linda bent down, prised open the letterbox, which had been stuck down with gaffer tape, and called through the gap in the calmest friendliest voice she could manage.

"Hello? Is there anybody in there? We need to talk to you."

Silence. They looked at each other once more.

"I suppose we'll have to get a warrant," Wallander muttered.

"Would they give you a warrant? We don't have a lot of concrete evidence. And besides, breaking in might do more harm than good. If there's a frightened young girl in there, she might be too scared to talk if we go kicking the door down. I know I would be."

Wallander nodded. He trusted Linda's judgement a great deal when it came to vulnerable young people. He didn't need much reminding that she too had been a vulnerable young woman once. If things had been even slightly different she might not even be standing here with him now.

"Hopefully it won't come to that. Give them one more try."

Linda called through the letterbox once more. No response. Wallander wandered impatiently to one of the windows and peered in. The blinds were drawn on both the windows that looked out on to the main street and he could see nothing through the first window. However the second one showed a crack between the bottom of the blind and the windowsill. He peeked through into the murk inside. He couldn't see much – the flat was painted in extremely drab colours that intensified the gloom – but after a moment his eyes rested on something that most definitely should not have been there. There was a heap on the floor beside the grim brown sofa: a heap of clothes and hair and limbs. It was another young woman, lying motionless in a pool of blood. Wallander felt his blood turn deathly cold.

Surely not another one?

* * *

It hadn't taken long for an ambulance, a patrol car and Nyberg's forensic team to turn up. Linda had been startled when her father had started to break the window. What had he seen in there? When she glanced through the now gaping hole in the glass she saw for herself what it was and helped him to break the break the rest of the pane. She had vaulted through the window and let him in at the front door and they had rushed to what they thought was another corpse. What had surprised them was that this one was not a corpse: she had a faint pulse.

The paramedics, when they arrived, examined the girl and determined that she was extremely badly injured. She had been beaten and had lost a lot of blood. She probably had internal injuries. Maybe she would never regain consciousness. Linda watched in silence as they immobilised her on a stretcher and loaded her into the ambulance. That could be me, she thought. One day I might be as unlucky as this girl. Some psychopath of a man could do this to me or anyone I know. She shuddered, a deep visceral shiver.

Wallander put his hand on her shoulder.

"Are you all right?"

"I'll be okay. But this is getting really nasty."

"Yes." Wallander looked slowly round the rooms where the girl in the ambulance had nearly been killed and where the girl in the morgue might possibly have lived. It seemed to be a drab, cold flat, with sparse furnishings and no personal effects of any kind. It wasn't a big place, and it smelled musty and damp. He left Linda's side and wandered into one of the bedrooms. It was a shambles. The wallpaper had begun to peel from the wall, although it looked as if someone had tried to stick it back in places. The bed was unmade, with dirty sheets. His nose wrinkled in disgust. Dear lord, how can people live like this, he was thinking.

He opened the wardrobe. Empty. Curious, he thought. He went into the other bedroom. It was in a similar state. This time, however, there were a few items of clothing lying in a heap at the bottom of the wardrobe. He looked closely at them, wondering if they belonged to the dead girl or the barely alive one.

Nyberg interrupted his train of thought.

"You really know how to pick them, don't you?"

"Hmmm?"

"Well, first that bar with all those teenage idiots standing around gawping, and now this… hovel."

"Next time I'll try and find you a crime scene in a five-star hotel."

"Yes, do that. It'll be more comfortable for all of us." Nyberg cast his eyes around the room. "This is even worse than the living room. Imagine sleeping in here."

"I've been trying to," Wallander replied morosely. "If this is where the girls were living then they've had a truly miserable life."

Nyberg nodded, his attention caught by something nearby.

"What have we here?" he exclaimed, tugging something out from under the mattress with a gloved hand. Wallander glanced sharply at him. In his hand he held what appeared to be a page from a letter. It was written in an unfamiliar language that he found impossible to read. It was written in Cyrillic script.

It was late. The wind was getting up outside, and it buffeted the windows of the police station. Linda was sitting with her chin resting on her hands, reading and re-reading the documents in front of her. At the opposite side of the conference table, Stefan chewed on a slice of pizza, a frown on his face. Chief Holgersson sat slightly apart from the table, tapping a pen on the sheet of paper in front of her, while Nyberg stared into space. Wallander wasn't sure how much Nyberg had heard of the past ten minutes' discussion. His mind seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

They had spent the past couple of hours going over the day's events and outlining the evidence so far to Holgersson. The discovery of a second young girl, alive this time, and the Cyrillic letter had added new impetus to their investigation. Holgersson had agreed that the case was serious. She had questioned Linda's theory, but had been concerned by the most recent turn of events.

"The last thing we want is for somebody to be able to go around brutalising young women like this," she said. "This past year we've done a lot of work in reducing crime against women and helping them feel safer. We don't want whoever did this to undo all that work."

"It's not just that," added Wallander, impatiently. "These girls have experienced a great deal of fear and misery. Whoever's responsible, I would like to see to it that he gets what he deserves. I think we owe it to those girls."

Holgersson gave a nod, which he took to signify agreement.

"Once this gets out, or course, the press are going to be all over us," she said. "We'll have to hold a press conference and explain the situation – for the public's sake as much as our own. I think tomorrow afternoon would probably be best. Kurt, can you arrange that in the morning?" Wallander nodded, suppressing the sense of annoyance he felt. He had always hated press conferences and the attendant mobs of journalists scrabbling frantically for whatever scraps of information could be extracted from the officer in charge.

"It's getting late," he said, stretching and yawning. "Sitting here all night is not going to get us anywhere. We should go home and reconvene tomorrow when we've had some sleep. We should have the first girl's post mortem report by then. It may give us more to go on." The others agreed and got to their feet, apart from Nyberg who was now studying a copy of the letter he had found.

"I'll have to run this by a translator," he muttered. "I wonder if it's Russian or Ukrainian?"

"Could be Bulgarian or Serbian," Linda suggested. Nyberg shrugged and gathered his documents into a plastic wallet.

They drifted out of the room. Linda cast a glance at Stefan, who was looking irritable.

"All right?" she asked. He gave a sarcastic laugh.

"Yeah, terrific."

"What's wrong?" They were standing on their own in the corridor now: the others had said their goodbyes and left. Stefan shrugged, his eyes glued to the floor. He attempted a smile.

"You tell me, eh?" He appeared to think for a moment, then suddenly looked up at her. "Listen, why don't we go for a drink? Let's leave our cars here and go and get ratted."

Normally Linda would have declined; she was tired and wanted nothing more than to go home, shower and fall into bed. However, something was bugging Stefan. Perhaps this was his way of trying to get help with it. She accepted.

* * *

In his flat on Mariagatan Wallander sat with a glass of Scotch, _Madama Butterfly_ playing in the background on the stereo. He often found that the two things together, whisky and opera, helped him either relax or think, or sometimes both.

This was a troubling case. It reminded him of a similar case years ago, not long after he had joined the police. A number of young women had begun to turn up dead, or as good as dead, all brutally beaten. It had been horrendous – he shuddered as he remembered it – and they had called in the national CID. In the end the culprit turned out to be a particularly unpleasant and violent gang leader. The women had all been associated with his gang in some way, most of them being forced into prostitution. When they refused to co-operate any longer they had been beaten and left to die. Forsaken and robbed of all hope.

He poured another whisky to make himself forget. Instead, he thought about the two young women involved in this case. Who were they? He was no closer to an answer. Surely they were somebody's friends, sisters or daughters? He knew that if someone treated his daughter this way he would kill them, or come damn close to it. If it were Linda, I would want the wretch responsible to get everything he deserved, he thought. And this was why, even though the rest of the world seemed to have forsaken these two girls, he would not. He was determined that he would not let them down.

He finished his Scotch and went to bed. Outside the wind dropped and snow began to fall.


	4. Chapter 4: Connection

Chapter 4: Connection

_A/N: A bit of Stefan/Linda here, and Stefan finds he's discovered an important clue without even realising it. The investigation is going slowly so far, but is about to take off!_

* * *

Stefan woke up on the couch. He looked groggily around for some time before it dawned on him that he was in Linda's living room. He rubbed his face, feeling the jagged stubble on his cheeks graze against his fingertips and his heavy eyelids complaining about having to stay open. It felt as if someone had glued his eyelashes together during the night. He could only imagine how he looked.

Looking at his watch he saw that he had plenty of time before he had to be at the station. He yawned and sank back into the sofa for a little while longer. It was dawn and the light coming through the gap in the curtains was still dim. There were no sounds from elsewhere in the house. Either Linda was still asleep or she had already gone out, although this was unlikely if she was in a similar state to him. What had happened last night? He vaguely remembered them being in a bar and drinking, and talking. What did I say to her, he thought, did I say anything stupid?

He got up and crept to the bathroom. The man in the bathroom mirror looked rough. He leaned over the sink and began to wash his face. It was coming back to him now, what last night had been all about. Frustration, emptiness, the cold hollow feeling he always seemed to have at this time of year. The fact that the current case was just a little too close to the bone. It had all come pouring out and Linda had listened and spoken of her own troubles. So he didn't think he'd embarrassed himself last night, but still…

"Why don't you have a shower? You'd feel better," said the voice behind him. He spun round. Linda was standing in the doorway watching him, her dressing gown pulled closely round her body, a tube of face cream in her hand. He smiled self-consciously.

"I should be going."

She shrugged. "At least have some breakfast."

"I'm all right."

"Really?" She was giving him an enquiring look, her left eyebrow slightly raised. He felt his resolve crumble: she was one of the few people on this earth who could see right through him.

"No, not really." He gave her a slightly embarrassed smile. "Actually, some coffee would be really good right now."

"Mm-hm, thought so," Linda muttered as she moved to the sink to wash her face. "Well, you know where the kitchen is. Help yourself to anything you want."

Once Linda was dressed they sat together at the kitchen table, drinking some exceedingly black coffee that Stefan had brewed. Linda grimaced with every mouthful, but the caffeine was welcome. They didn't say much. After the previous night's heart-to-heart, neither felt the need to speak.

I miss this, Stefan thought. When we were together we used to spend time just drinking coffee and hanging out together. What went wrong? Out loud, he heard himself asking her why they had split up. She looked up from her cup, then slowly put it down.

"You know why," she said. "We've been over this before."

"I know. But it still doesn't make sense."

"What does?" she shrugged. "Come on, we're going to be late."

They left the house. It was a cold, bright morning and a fresh layer of snow covered the streets and rooftops of Ystad.

* * *

Wallander had been in his office since dawn, drinking coffee and trying to make sense of the situation. He also had a press conference to arrange. Right now he was looking at the fax that Stefan had received the previous afternoon. The name on it, Lasse Hallström, stood out to him, and he wasn't sure why. He had crossed paths with this man before, he was sure of it, but where and when? He would get Svartman or Martinsson to run some background checks. Then, perhaps, he would have a clearer picture.

Stefan and Linda slipped quietly to their desks, having been accosted by Ebba, who had given them a knowing smile. Wallander looked up, his eye caught by the sudden movement outside his door, then went back to the contents of the file, which were strewn over his desk.

There was a report from the hospital about the girl they had found yesterday. She was struggling, but holding on. He sighed as he read the catalogue of injuries she had sustained. Fractured tibia, dislocated shoulder, depressed skull fracture, cracked ribs, internal bleeding… it read like the list of cases for a whole hospital Emergency department, but it was for only one young girl, who was hovering precariously between life and death. Wallander shook his head and placed the report back in the file. Today he was also expecting post mortem report for the first victim. The thought depressed him further, so he went to get another cup of coffee.

When he went into the break room, Linda was already there. They smiled at each other over the coffee machine.

"Good night last night?" Wallander ventured.

"What?"

"I saw you and Stefan coming in together."

"Dad!" she protested. "Yes, okay, he stayed at my place last night. But he slept on the couch."

"Okay. I wasn't prying. I just don't want you to get hurt."

"DAD!" snapped Linda again. "I'm fine, okay? Stefan's my friend, that's all."

"I know, I know. I think I'm going to leave this conversation now."

"Yes, good idea." Linda gave her father a look that was half exasperated frown, half affectionate smile. He smiled back and went back to his office.

In his absence, the post mortem report had been placed on his desk.

* * *

It took an hour to sift through the report, which detailed the sum total of a violent death and the wretched existence that had preceded it. Along with the report from the hospital on the other victim, it didn't make pleasant reading.

The team sat around the conference table, looking over the various documents and trying to piece the case together. Nyberg had spoken to a translator, who had determined that the letter was in a dialect of Russian. He hoped to have a translation later that day. Linda had phoned the hospital and spoken to the doctor in charge of the injured girl. He had been unable to say whether she was likely to gain consciousness or not.

Stefan studied the post mortem photos, a frown of concentration on his face.

"There's a footprint on the body," he remarked suddenly. "The brute kicked so hard you can even see the pattern from the sole of his shoe."

"Yes, I noticed that too," replied Nyberg. "In fact…" he continued, reaching for the photographs of the injured girl, "there's some bruises on the other girl that look remarkably similar." He put two photos side by side, and the others crowded round to look. He glanced up at them. "Either these two women were beaten and kicked by the same man, or I'm seeing things."

"No, you're not seeing things," Wallander murmured. "It looks like we have a link between these two."

Stefan was still staring at the post mortem pictures. In front of him was a photo of the dead girl's right hand. Her middle finger was injured: it had a curiously shaped imprint and was covered in abrasions, as if something had been scraped roughly down the length of the finger. As if the girl had had a ring violently torn from her finger. He felt himself go rigid. He recognised the imprint on her finger. The shape was familiar to him from somewhere. A light snapped on inside his brain and he took a gulp of air, suddenly realising that he had been holding his breath.

"Stefan?" Wallander looked round at his colleague.

"Wait there!" Stefan instructed, leaping to his feet. He strode out of the room and quickly went to his jacket, which he had draped over the back of his chair. He found the secure inner pocket and unzipped it. Reaching inside he found what he was looking for. The ring's red stone glittered as he held it to the light, as it might have glittered when the dead girl had worn it. Without even realising it, he had been carrying a piece of evidence around in his pocket for two days. He dropped it into an evidence bag that was lying on Linda's desk.

When he came back to the conference room, everyone else was tripping over themselves with curiosity. He handed Wallander the bag with the ring in.

"What's this?" Wallander was confused, until Stefan placed the picture of the girl's hand in front of him. He looked at both items intently, then turned to Stefan.

"Where did you get this?" he asked.

"It was in that caravan the other day."

They held each other's gaze for some time, before Wallander spoke.

"Get onto the traffic division. Make sure they haven't done anything stupid with that caravan!"

* * *

Linda walked through the long anodyne hospital corridors. She disliked hospitals, but she felt she should be here. Eventually she reached the intensive care unit. She was supposed to meet a Doctor Bergdahl. She found his office and knocked on the door.

"Come in," replied a muffled voice on the other side. She opened the door and entered, finding a warm bright office inside. The doctor was immersed in a report, and several large bundles of paper were scattered on the top of his mahogany desk. Weak sunlight poured in through the window behind him, illuminating his fair hair, which sat in an unruly mop on his head.

"I won't be a minute," he muttered. "Please, have a seat." Linda sat, watching him with interest. He reminded her a little of the family doctor who had treated her when she was a little girl. He looked like a kind, committed man, she thought. Whoever their nameless victim was, she was in good hands here.

The doctor finished the page he was on and re-shuffled the papers on his desk, before looking up at her with a smile. Linda gave a half-smile in return. She was anxious to get on with this.

"Thanks for seeing me," she said.

"Not a problem. We always want to cooperate with the police, especially in a case as nasty as this."

"I read your report this morning. It was… disturbing."

Doctor Bergdahl nodded gravely.

"This is one of the worst assaults I've seen, and I've been in this job for seventeen years. Makes you wonder what the world's coming to." He sighed and shook his head. "Anyway, do you want to see her now?"

Linda nodded. They got up and left the office. The doctor led the way down the corridor and into a small room that seemed full of equipment. There was a heart monitor, stands holding IV bags with various medications and nutrients and a machine to pump air in and out of the unconscious patient's chest. In the midst of it all, the girl looked small and exceedingly frail. Linda went to her bedside and looked at her. The doctor's report has estimated the girl's age at about 19, but she looked younger. Linda glanced over at Doctor Bergdahl, who was taking a reading from the heart monitor.

"Do you think she'll wake up?" she asked.

"It's hard to say. She's had a bad head injury and we don't know if there's been brain damage yet. Actually, it's remarkable she's survived this long. She's tough."

Linda leaned over the unconscious girl, watching her face, looking for signs of life, an identifying mark, anything at all.

"I hope she comes round," she said quietly. "We don't even know her name."


	5. Chapter 5: Petya and Annushka

_Chapter Five: Petya and Annushka_

The traffic division had been curious as to why the CID suddenly needed to see one of their impounded vehicles. With their help, it hadn't taken Nyberg long to work over the charred caravan, checking for anything and everything that might constitute useful evidence, despite numerous questions from the officer in charge. He bagged the abandoned clothes, dusted for prints, collected samples and examined the fixtures and fittings. The inside of the van was filthy and Nyberg screwed up his face in disgust to see the detritus that had collected in corners and under furniture. However, the dirt and dust would be useful. It would be able to tell them where the caravan had been and who had been in there. He had the caravan placed in a secure area in case he needed to examine it again, and took his samples back to the station, where the painstaking work of analysing them would begin.

He arrived just as Wallander was finishing his press conference. It had gone much as usual: the regular sea of impatient faces, baying for scraps of information and pressuring him for more details than he was willing to give. As Wallander had looked out at them he had wondered if they realised how much he disliked and distrusted them all. Then he had got on with the business of detailing the events of the past few days, made an appeal for information and left Holgersson to field the more awkward questions. When he left the conference and joined Nyberg he looked relieved.

"What did you find?" he asked.

"Enough to keep me busy for the rest of the day. Probably most of the night as well. It's a good thing I don't have a social life."

Wallander laughed quietly.

"None of us has a social life, apart from Linda and Stefan, perhaps."

Nyberg shrugged.

"They're still young. Just wait a few years…" He turned into his office and set to work. Wallander strolled back to his own office and called Stefan in. Stefan strolled in and looked at his boss expectantly.

"Lasse Hallström," said Wallander. "What do you know about him?"

"I've crossed paths with him before," said Stefan thoughtfully. "Drug running, illegal imports – tobacco, cheap spirits, that sort of thing. He's a nasty bit of work, but he seems to have kept out of our way for a few years."

"I thought I knew the name from somewhere. I was going to get Martinsson to do some digging, but it seems you're quite familiar with him."

Stefan nodded, sitting down in the spare chair opposite and leaning on Wallander's desk.

"We knew all about him back before I moved here, when I worked in Borås," he said. "I think most of the police forces round southern Sweden have dealt with him. He's trouble."

"Hmm," Wallander tapped his fingers on is desk, deep in thought for a moment. "I think we should perhaps pay Mr Hallström a visit. What do you think?"

"I'd definitely be up for that."

"Good man, I knew you would."

Their conversation was abruptly interrupted when Wallander's phone rang. The resulting exchange was short and to the point.

"Yes?...

"When?...

"How is she?...

"We'll be right there."

Wallander put the phone down with a serious but relieved expression on his face.

"That was the hospital," he said. "Our girl has just woken up."

* * *

It was getting dark by the time Wallander and Stefan arrived at the hospital. A nurse was drawing the curtains in the young woman's room as Doctor Bergdahl showed them in.

"This needs to be quick," he warned them. "She has a head injury and she's still very weak. I don't want her put under any more stress than necessary." Wallander nodded and glanced down at the frail young patient in the bed. She had appeared to be sleeping when they came in, but at the sound of their voices her eyes had snapped open. She looked up at them from behind her oxygen mask with an expression bordering on terror.

"It's all right," Wallander soothed. "We won't hurt you. We just want to talk to you for a few minutes."

Doctor Bergdahl shook his head.

"I don't think she speaks much Swedish. I tried to talk to her earlier, but we couldn't understand each other."

Wallander nodded, and thought for a moment. Finally he spoke to the girl in English.

"Can you understand me now?"

She nodded and clawed at the oxygen mask. The nurse helped her remove it, and adjusted the bed so that she was sitting up. She looked at Wallander and nodded again.

"My name is Kurt Wallander. I'm from the Ystad police. You're safe now, but we need to know what happened to you," Wallander continued in English. "Can you talk to us for a few minutes?"

"Okay," she said hoarsely, her eyes darting between Wallander and Stefan.

"I'm Stefan Lindman, Kurt's colleague. You're going to be all right now," Stefan reassured her. She nodded again, and winced. Her head was still painful. Doctor Bergdahl looked concerned, but said nothing.

"Can you tell us your name?" Wallander asked, sitting on a chair by the girl's bed.

"Petya. Petya Volkova."

"Where are you from, Petya?"

"Russia. Novgorod."

"Do you remember what happened to you?"

Petya nodded slowly, squeezing her eyes shut. Tears escaped between her eyelids and coursed down her face.

"I work for Lasse. He was angry with me because I didn't want to work for him any more. I told him I wanted to go home. Then he got mad." She wiped her face and sniffed.

"Lasse?" said Wallander. "You mean Lasse Hallström?"

Petya nodded.

"He was nice at first, but then he started to be mean and angry. He hit us all."

"All? How many of you were there?"

"Four of us. We all had to…" Petya bit her lip, not wanting to say more.

"I know," Wallander put his hand on hers. "You don't have to tell us. I know what he made you do." Petya wiped her eyes again, her lip trembling.

"Can you tell us what happened to the other girls?" Stefan interjected.

"I don't know. Before he beat me up Lasse got mad at Annushka. He hit her and kicked her. I thought he was going to kill her!" Petya was becoming distressed and Doctor Bergdahl looked disapprovingly at Stefan. "Then she got away from him and got out the door. I don't know where she went. I didn't see her again." Petya began to sob.

"I think that's enough for now, Inspector," said Doctor Bergdahl firmly. "My patient needs to rest. She's got a skull fracture, and this isn't going to do her any good."

Wallander nodded. He patted Petya's hand gently.

"Thank you Petya," he said. "Come on," he beckoned to Stefan. "We've got a social call to make."

They left the room and moved down the long white corridor. Stefan cast a sideways glance at his boss.

"Looks like our other victim has a name. Annushka."

"Annushka," echoed Wallander. "Annushka who? That's the question. Come on, Stefan. We've got an arrest to make."


	6. Chapter 6: Raakel

_Chapter 6: Raakel_

Lasse Hallström's cottage was some distance from Ystad. Wallander gave directions while Stefan drove, paying little attention to the speed limit on the rural roads.

"Careful," Wallander muttered as they took a corner side-on.

After a while they reached the turning for the cottage. They left the car in the long drive and walked towards the house. A patrol car was on its way as backup. In the meantime, they approached the cottage quietly, not wanting to give Lasse prior warning of their visit.

The cottage was on its own beside a small lake. It was surrounded by pine forest. In the summer it would be a pleasant spot. In the dismal black of a Skåne winter night, however, it seemed almost impossibly quiet and unnervingly dark. A light shone from one window, casting a warm glow on the nearby snow, but otherwise the whole scene was cold and uninviting. Stefan shuddered and pulled his jacket up to his ears. Wallander dug his hands further into his pockets.

They reached the front door and Wallander nodded to Stefan, who knocked sharply. They waited. Footsteps approached the other side of the door and someone began to undo several locks and bolts. The two men looked at each other. It seemed that Lasse Hallström was rather paranoid about security.

At last the door opened and instead of the imposing figure of Lasse, the two were surprised to see a young woman. In her right hand she held a hunting rifle, in her left a mobile phone.

"Who the hell are you?" she said, her voice loud and strident. She had an odd accent that Wallander struggled to recognise.

Stefan showed the woman his badge.

"Stefan Lindman, Ystad police. We're looking for Lasse Hallström."

"Well, he's not here. Go away." She slammed the door shut, leaving them outside in the dark. Stefan gritted his teeth and knocked again.

"Listen," he shouted through the door. "Either you can open this door and talk to us now, or we'll get a warrant and search this property by force. It's up to you."

For a minute there was silence, then the door opened again. The woman stood in the doorway, arms crossed, scowling at them.

"What do you want with Lasse? Haven't you lot given him enough trouble?"

"No," said Wallander coldly. "We haven't even started yet."

* * *

Linda had fallen asleep at her desk. Yesterday's late night and the mental exertion of compiling evidence and retrieving a complete police history of Lasse Hallström sapped her of her last bit of energy. Unable to resist any more, she had put her head on the desk and closed her eyes. It's just for a moment, she told herself. Just some quiet thinking time.

Before she knew it, her eyes had closed and she was having a confused dream where she was the victim lying in the hospital bed. She thought her dad was there somewhere, and Stefan too, although she couldn't see them. Suddenly she saw Lasse standing over her. She woke with a jump and realised that she had dropped off.

I need to stop taking these cases so personally, she thought. She wondered where her father and Stefan were. They had apparently gone to arrest Lasse. There was no sign of their return yet. She decided to wait for them to come back before she went home. If something happened, if she was needed, she wanted to be around.

And she wanted to speak to Stefan again. It had been good to spend time with him last night. He had opened up to her in a way that he had never done before. If only we could have talked like that when we were together, she thought wistfully. Now they were no longer an item she did miss his company. She missed having him to drink with and curl up with on the couch. It was probably better this way, but she couldn't deny there was a spark between them, and it meant that she would never quite stop caring about him.

Nyberg strolled through the office, interrupting her thoughts.

"I'm sorry, I didn't realise you were still here."

"Just finishing some reports. Have they arrested that bloke yet, do you know?"

"No." Nyberg sat heavily in a spare chair. "Ugh, I'm exhausted. Time I had a holiday." Linda smiled at him.

"Me too," she said. "But you were saying?"

"Hmm? Oh, yes. Kurt phoned a while ago to let Control know he didn't need the backup car after all. According to Hallström's girlfriend, he's gone on a 'business trip'. Of course, Kurt might bring her in instead, if he thinks she knows where he is."

"Lasse has a girlfriend? What kind of woman would be with a man like that?"

"You'd be surprised," sighed Nyberg. "People are good at deluding themselves about the people in their lives." He looked at his watch and yawned. "I should go. I promised my neighbour I would help him with his burglar alarm. The silly fool keeps forgetting how to deactivate it." He got up and headed for the door.

"Bye," Linda called after him. She watched him leave, then turned back to her desk. She didn't have long to wait before her father and Stefan returned. They had brought a guest with them

* * *

Raakel Virtanen was twenty-eight years old and from Helsinki. Until now she had led an uneventful life, but for one detail. Three and a half years previously she had met and fallen in love with a Swede named Lasse Hallström. As far as she was concerned, the sun shone from him. She knew some of the things he got up – activities of dubious legality, and some that were completely criminal – and she didn't care. He treated her like a princess, and that was all that mattered.

Well not any more, Wallander thought grimly as he stared at her across the interview table. He was going to get it through to her, one way or another, that her boyfriend was a dangerous man who was at least partly responsible for the death of one girl and the serious injury of another. It was time she faced up to what he was capable of.

Raakel watched him warily.

"Am I under arrest?" she spat.

"Not yet. But if we think you're trying to obstruct our investigation, then that could change."

She said nothing, but glared at him as him she took a drink from the cup in front of her.

"Now, Raakel, I'm going to ask you again. Where's Lasse?"

"You don't get it, do you? I'm NOT going to tell you just so you can go and bother him about some stupid weed, or passports, or vodka, or whatever it is this time." She crossed her arms and gazed obstinately at him. "Okay, he doesn't always obey the law, but he doesn't deserve the harassment he gets from you lot."

"Really? Let me remind you he's wanted in connection with the death of a 17-year-old girl."

"That wasn't him." Raakel's eyes flickered momentarily.

In the observation room, Stefan and Linda were watching the interview on the monitor. Stefan observed Raakel closely.

"That made her uncomfortable," he remarked. "Did you see her face when he mentioned the murder?" Linda nodded, moving closer to the screen to watch the woman.

"She's wondering if the man she loves could really behave like that," she said. She looked up at Stefan. "He's put a doubt in her mind." Stefan nodded in agreement.

"She's stubborn, but he's very determined to get an answer out of her."

Stefan reached for his coffee, inadvertently brushing Linda's hand. They looked at each other for a moment, until Stefan gave an embarrassed smile.

"Sorry," he murmured. He wasn't sure why he apologised.

They turned back to the screen.

Down in the interview room Wallander had been trying his interviewee's patience.

"How would I know where Lasse is?" Raakel was saying. "He's his own man. If he wants to go away, he goes. He doesn't have to tell me everything."

"So he didn't tell you about the girls?"

"What girls?"

"The girls that he's been keeping imprisoned in a dirty flat in Ystad. The girls that he's abused, beaten up, and probably forced to sell themselves for his profit. _THESE GIRLS_!" Wallander threw the photos of Petya and her dead friend onto the table. Raakel jumped. She had not expected him to lose his temper, and it alarmed her.

Wallander pushed the picture of the dead girl, the girl who was possibly called Annushka, across the table to Raakel. In spite of herself she glanced down at it. It was one of the less unpleasant photos – Karin and her team had cleaned the girl up as best they could – but it was still not a pleasant sight. Wallander watched Raakel take it in, watched the uneven rise and fall of her chest as her breath became uneven, watched as the colour drained from her face.

"Who— who is she?" Raakel stammered at last.

"We're not sure. We think her name was Annushka. She was only seventeen."

Raakel shook her head vigorously.

"No. No, I don't know her. I don't…" she took a sip of water and rubbed her face. "How do you know Lasse had anything to do with this?"

"He owns the flat that she lived in. We know she was there because the neighbours used to see her and the other girls sometimes."

"What flat? Where?"

"You didn't know about that either?" Raakel shook her head. Wallander had her on the back foot now. The shock tactics had worked. She was shaken.

"It seems there's a lot of things he's not been telling you." One more jab. Raakel flinched.

"I can't believe this," she said. "I knew about some of the illegal stuff, I knew he had a filthy temper, but this… If this is true, I'll kill him."

"No you won't. But you will tell us what you know."

In another half-hour, Wallander had extracted enough information about Lasse's associates, business interests and possible whereabouts to keep his team busy for several days. Raakel, suddenly chastened, offered surprisingly little resistance. He terminated the interview and told two of the uniform officers to drive her home. He would have the cottage watched, in case Lasse decided to return.

He ambled back to the observation room, where he knew Stefan and Linda would be. There was a lot to discuss, but most of it could wait till the next day.

"What's going to happen to Petya?" Linda wanted to know.

"We need to talk to her again and find out much more about her and her friend – Annushka." Wallander slumped into a chair. "We need to know how they got here, for a start."

"People smuggling?" suggested Stefan.

"Very likely." Wallander glanced at Linda, who looked troubled. She had seen some of the horrific effects of this kind of thing before.

"Go home, you two," he said, yawning. "Have some rest. Tomorrow's the weekend, of course, not that it'll do _us_ much good." He smiled at them. "Go on. I'll finish up here."

When they had left, Wallander took out his mobile phone. He had had an idea. It never hurts to call in outside help, and he particularly wanted to see this outside help again.

On his phone, he selected an entry for "Henrietta" and dialled. In Denmark, a woman with a familiar voice answered his call.

* * *

In the car park, Stefan and Linda were still standing talking, seemingly neither of them willing to leave.

"This is bigger than a couple of teenage prostitutes being badly beaten, isn't it?" Linda said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

"It could be as big as what happened with that container lorry," Stefan admitted.

"Don't." Linda shuddered. The memory of the container lorry and its gruesome contents still disturbed her.

"Sorry." Stefan looked at the ground. Linda glanced up at him and stalled for a moment.

"Listen," she said, finally. "I don't feel like going home yet. Why don't we go and get some pizza? That place that my Dad likes will be open."

Stefan grinned at her, a wide, warm smile that made her better.

"That's the best thing anyone's said to me all day."

They got into their cars and drove into town, leaving the car park in silence. The snow had stopped hours ago and a clear, starry sky stretched overhead. On such a night it was easy to forget that people like Lasse Hallström existed.


	7. Chapter 7: Ominous Signs

_Chapter 7: Ominous Signs_

It was a grey, misty morning. Wallander chose to walk to the police station, winding his way through the familiar streets, wrapped up tightly against the freezing fog that had descended upon the town. It was Saturday and by rights he didn't even have to go in to the station – the on-duty officers would call him if there were any developments – but he felt that he needed to be there.

His mind was troubled. He had woken up early that morning and been unable to fall properly asleep again. He had turned the events of the previous few days over and over in his mind, trying to comprehend the situation. At the heart of this ugly crime was a group of very vulnerable young women. One was dead. One was in hospital, lucky to be alive, and he wasn't looking forward to having to interview her properly. The other two girls that they now knew about seemed to have vanished. Who could tell if they had possibly shared the same fate as Annushka? It was this that troubled Wallander most, along with the thought that there could be even more girls involved in this sordid business. What if Lasse Hallström had other flats in Ystad or elsewhere, where other girls were being forced to live lives of abject misery for his gain? It didn't bear thinking about.

Wallander reached the station and went straight to his office, where he shut the door, lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair, once again studying the various reports and extracts from databases that had accrued since the case began. He tracked Lasse's record of arrests, convictions and acquittals, noting his associates, henchmen, cellmates, anyone who was known to have had significant contact with him. There were some interesting names on the record, including several that Wallander had arrested himself. He took a deep draw on his cigarette and narrowed his eyes as he read. It appeared that on one instance Frank Borg had helped to get him put away for his role in a counterfeiting ring in Malmö. Wallander exhaled sharply as he read the name. Trust Frank to have been involved with him somewhere.

He reached he last page and was about to finish and put the report down when one name near the bottom caught his eye. In an instant he was transported back twenty-five years, to the case that he had thought of two evenings previously, involving another string of brutalised women. He shuddered. It seemed that Lasse Hallström had once shared a prison cell with the sadistic gang leader Viktor Eklund, who appeared to have protected him while he was inside. Lasse had to have learned his viciousness from somewhere. It seemed here was the source.

Wallander had just decided to go for some coffee to steady himself when his phone rang. He answered and a female voice greeted him on the other end. He had rarely been as glad to speak to anyone as he was to speak to Henrietta right at that moment.

* * *

Wallander was on the phone for a long time. Henrietta had pulled some strings in her department and had made arrangements to come to Ystad on Monday. She was anxious to be involved in the investigation; her team had been working on a similar case in Copenhagen. They discussed the situation at great length and once the conversation had finished Wallander felt a little reassured. It was vital that they stopped any more girls being smuggled into Skåne, and Henrietta's help would be invaluable.

On a personal level, he was also looking forward to meeting her again. The time they had spent together working on the container lorry case had been interesting, if not entirely enjoyable. He wanted to get to know her better.

He stretched and yawned, deciding to stroll to the coffee machine. After that, he would check Petya's progress with the hospital, then find out if Nyberg had had the Russian letter translated. As always, the day and its tasks stretched ahead of him.

* * *

Once again Linda was walking the long white hospital corridors, looking for Petya's ward. She had a bunch of flowers for the girl, which she supposed would make her room look a little more cheerful.

Petya's condition had improved and she had been moved to a new room, where there were fewer machines. She was propped up on pillows, staring out of the window at the sky. Linda knocked softly on the door. Petya shot an anxious glance at her.

"Hi," said Linda, in English. "I'm Linda Wallander from the Ystad police. How are you feeling today?"

"I have a sore head," croaked Petya weakly.

Linda smiled and came into the room, sitting on a chair by the bed. Petya looked at her critically for a minute.

"I didn't see you here before?"

"I came to see you when you were still unconscious. But you spoke to my dad yesterday."

Petya frowned, deep in thought for a moment, then relaxed. She nodded, then winced from the pain in her head.

"Yes, I remember now. There were two men here yesterday. They asked me who I was and what happened…" She trailed off, looking out the window again. Linda put her hand on the girl's arm.

"I know you've had a bad time, but it's over. You're safe now."

"What about Annushka, my friend?"

Linda could hardly bear to tell Petya the truth, yet she knew the girl deserved to know and that she would have to be told sooner or later. Petya stared at her, reading the uncertainty in her face.

"What?" she demanded. "What happened?"

Linda bit her lips.

"Petya, I'm afraid it's bad news…"

"She's dead?"

Linda nodded. Petya leaned back on her pillows. A tear escaped from her eye and she wiped it away with an impatient hand, mumbling something in Russian. She reached for the small gold crucifix that was hanging round her neck and held it in her fingertips. More tears fell from her eyes and ran down her face. Linda was silent, not knowing what to say. Finally Petya blinked away the tears and looked at her.

"Can I see her?"

"What?"

"Can I see Annushka?"

"Maybe when you're a little better. It's not a nice sight." Linda looked down at her hands, remembering the photos. "You're absolutely sure you want to see her?"

"Yes. I want to say goodbye. I didn't know her long, but we always stuck together. I'll never forget…"

"When you're well enough I'll see what I can do."

Petya gave a little nod of acknowledgement and leaned back on her pillows with a heavy sigh.

Linda stayed with her until she fell asleep. She found a vase for the flowers, then left quietly and drove home. She would pick up a few things, she decided, then she would drive down to the station and try to get some work done. There was last night's interview with Raakel Virtanen to review, and any number of reports to be read and collated. She pulled up outside her house. The street was quiet.

As she reached in her pocket for her key, she failed to see the menacing figure approaching her from behind. He locked an arm round her throat and clapped his other hand over her mouth as she tried to scream.

"Let's go and have a little talk, shall we?" he growled in her ear, dragging her down an alleyway between two houses. She struggled to loosen his grasp, terrified at what he might do to her. After a few moments, however, her rational brain reasserted itself and she remembered her self-defence training. In a rush of adrenaline she threw him off and snatched at a pepper spray that she knew was in her jacket pocket.

"What the hell are you doing?" she shouted, pointing the canister at him.

For a moment he stared at her, then there was a loud shout from the street. Her attacker shot a glance in its direction, then took to his heels. Linda turned to see Stefan sprinting towards her. He chased after the man, but it was too late and he had vanished. Breathless, he made his way back to Linda, who had sunk to the ground, suddenly weak. She sat shaking, looking up at him. He offered her his hand, and pulled her to her feet.

"Are you okay?"

"I'll be all right."

"You're shaking. Come on, come with me." He wrapped a protective arm round her shoulders and shepherded her to her front door. Once she had unlocked it, he led her into the living room and made her sit down while he made some strong black coffee. She took the cup with a watery smile.

"You don't have to do this, I'm fine."

Stefan crouched in front of her and put a hand on her arm.

"It's a good thing I came round though. Who was that bloke?"

Linda shook her head.

"I have no idea." Her hands had stopped shaking now. She looked up at him. "I'm glad you turned up. Thank you."

"Come on, you'd do the same for me!" He flopped onto the couch next to her, gently play-punching her arm. They both laughed gently, the trauma of the incident dispelled.


	8. Chapter 8: Meanings

_Chapter 8: Meanings_

"What do you mean, 'no harm done'? He could have killed you!"

Wallander stared open-mouthed at his daughter, who stood on the other side of his desk, gently rubbing the bruise on her neck where her assailant had restrained her. The outburst had taken it out of him and he sank back onto his chair, waiting for her to reply.

"I mean he didn't get the chance to do anything to me. I shook him off, then Stefan turned up and he showed us both a clean pair of heels."

Wallander rubbed his forehead wearily.

"I suppose it's a warning," he muttered. "We're getting too close for Hallström's comfort, so he sends us a message to tell us to back off."

"It must have been," Linda concurred. She sat slowly down in the spare chair and leaned against her father's desk. "It could have been… nasty. But luckily I got myself free and had a pepper spray in my pocket. And luckily Stefan got there when he did." She shot a glance up at Stefan, who gave a somewhat embarrassed smile and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Yes, thank you Stefan," acknowledged Wallander. The two men briefly nodded to each other before Linda suddenly spoke again.

"What about Petya?" she interjected.

"What about her?"

"Well, she knows a lot more about what's been going on than I do. If they threatened me, what's to stop them threatening her… or worse?"

"She's got a point," said Stefan. "Shouldn't we secure her hospital room?"

Wallander nodded.

"Good idea. Stefan, can you arrange that now? We can post a guard on her room and when she's well enough to leave we'll make sure she goes to a safe-house."

"I'm onto it." Stefan quickly left the office, leaving father and daughter staring at each other across the desk.

"And how are you really?" Wallander wanted to know.

"I'm okay, Dad. Really. I had a shock, but I'm fine."

"Good. Thank goodness for Stefan, hmm?"

"I'm sure I could have handled it without him," Linda replied dryly. "But yes, he took good care of me. And I'd have done the same for him."

"As you told me yesterday, a good friend." Wallander smiled at her. "Now, if you're up to it why don't you look over the interview from last night? See if you can get anything useful from it."

Linda nodded and went to find the tape. Wallander settled back in his chair with a sigh. The day's events troubled him. He wondered if he should have Linda's house watched, just in case the thug tried the same thing again. She would never agree to that, he thought. Perhaps he should stay there himself tonight. If nothing else, it would put his own mind at rest.

His thoughts were interrupted by the phone. Absently, he lifted it to his ear then, as the person at the other end began speaking, forced himself to pay attention. It was Nyberg's translator, who had decoded the Russian letter.

* * *

Stefan had finished the security arrangements for Petya's hospital room. Two officers would be posted in or near the room at all times. They were under specific instructions to monitor all visitors who were not known to them. They were to take absolutely no chances with Petya's safety. After all, she was their main witness. They couldn't afford for anything to happen to her. Stefan had couched his instructions in those terms, but what concerned him the most was ensuring that the vulnerable young woman was protected from any further abuse. He wasn't ready to admit it to anyone, but he knew more about what Petya was likely to be going through than his colleagues might have suspected.

Arrangements made, he turned his attention to the criminal records database and spent some time running queries. It had occurred to him to see if he recognised Linda's attacker from any of the database entries. I got a good enough look at the man, he thought. If the thug's in here I'll find him.

And he very much wanted to find him. In spite of everything that had passed between him and Linda, he still felt protective of her. Anyone who threatened to harm her would have him to deal with— and quite possibly Kurt as well. Stefan wondered how Linda would feel if she realised she had two personal avengers.

Coincidentally, his ears caught the sound of her voice at that moment.

"No, it's fine, I can manage," she was saying to someone. Stefan smiled. Such a self-reliant person, even when she was in a vulnerable situation. It was one of the things he had always liked about her.

Linda strode into the office carrying a large, bulky box, presumably the thing she had just asserted that she could manage. Nyberg followed in her wake, carrying another. Stefan gave them both a quizzical stare.

"Some evidence," said Nyberg, by way of explanation. "Stuff I recovered from that caravan you found, and from the girls' flat. Take my advice, and handle it with latex gloves." He cast a disgusted glance at the boxes and turned to leave, only to be summoned by Wallander, who had heard him come in. With a sigh he turned back and made his way into Wallander's office, leaving Stefan and Linda with the boxes.

"So what kind of stuff has he brought us this time?" Stefan wondered. Linda shook her head.

"I'm not sure. Mostly clothes, I guess. Now he's got all his samples he doesn't need them any more."

She glanced up at Stefan and saw what was on his computer screen.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Hunting for thugs," he said.

"What, that bloke from this morning? Why? We already know he's one of Lasse's mob."

"I want to know who he is. He needs to get what's coming to him, him and all the other creeps Lasse has working for him."

"You don't have to do it on my account. I can look after myself." She was getting annoyed now, he could tell.

"I know you can," he answered. "But look at it this way: if we track him down, he might lead us to wherever Lasse is hiding."

Linda stopped and thought for a moment, realising that he might be right.

"It's an idea," she admitted, slowly sitting down next to him. "Another thing, though. I've been reviewing the tape of Raakel's interview last night. She mentioned his trips abroad to Eastern Europe, Estonia, places like that— well, you remember, you were there. And she also mentioned something about him having several homes. I'd like to know more about his trips and these houses of his: he could be hiding the other girls in one of them."

Stefan nodded.

"That's good thinking. Do you want to go and talk to her now?"

"What about the evidence?" She jerked her head towards the nearby cardboard boxes. Stefan shook his head impatiently.

"Nyberg can take us through all that on Monday."

"Okay. I'll let Dad know where we're going."

"Good idea. We don't want him panicking, eh?"

Linda ignored the facetious remark and knocked on her father's door.

* * *

Wallander had spent half an hour listening to the finer points of the translator's interpretation of the letter from the grubby flat where they had found Petya. The man had faxed him a copy of the translation, and spent so long talking about the technical details of the language used that Wallander felt himself getting a headache. At length, he told him to come to the station on Monday to explain the letter to Nyberg, then rang off, rubbing his temples. He needed a cigarette.

The translation service's first estimate – that the letter was in Russian – had been inaccurate, to say the least. This translator, who said he was an expert in east Slavic languages, had had the letter passed to him when his more junior colleague had been unable to decipher the vocabulary. He had taken one look at it and realised that it was not Russian, but Belarusian. Wallander's head swam. Potentially, then, he thought, we're dealing with women being smuggled not just from Russia, but also from Belarus and heaven knows where else. What's Lisa going to say about this?

He decided not to disturb Holgersson at the weekend. He could live without the reaction he knew he'd get and it wouldn't hurt her to hear about it on Monday.

Hearing Nyberg's voice in the outer office jolted him back to the here and now. He would speak to him about this, he decided, and the pair of them could try and see where this bit of information fitted the big picture.

When Linda knocked on his door, the pair were engrossed in a discussion of the evidence. Nyberg paused in the middle of his description of the multiple sets of fingerprints he had found on the letter long enough for Linda to explain where she and Stefan were going. Wallander raised his eyebrows and nodded to her.

"Svartman and Nordström are up there watching the place just now, but be careful, yes?"

Linda nodded and left, and Nyberg carried on. Wallander massaged his head and swallowed some painkillers.

"So who do the fingerprints belong to, then?" he challenged.

"Well, that's just the thing: we don't have any of them on file. They could be anyone's."

Wallander sighed and put his head in his hands.

"What a damn mess," he groaned.

* * *

Stefan was at the wheel. He drove faster than normal, and took corners more wildly than usual, like a man daydreaming about driving a Formula One car. Linda clutched at the door handle as they bucketed down a quiet country road.

"Where's the fire?" she asked anxiously. Stefan glanced across at her with a grin.

"Just having some fun."

"Fun? Stefan, I know that sometimes you like to remind yourself that you're still alive, but please don't do it when I'm in the car with you."

Stefan gave her a fleeting look before his eyes flickered back to the road ahead. She had seen through him, of course. He did this for distraction when he was just plain bored, or when something bothered him. What better treatment for a shock to the system than another shock?

They reached the turning for the house Lasse and Raakel shared: the dirt track of the driveway almost hidden in the pine forest. Stefan wondered how he and Kurt had been able to find it in the dark.

Svartman and Nordström were ensconced in an unmarked car on the track, where they could keep an eye on who came and went. They both looked enormously bored.

Stefan pulled over for a moment to talk to them.

"I should have brought you some magazines," he joked. They laughed and gave a short account of the day's activity, which amounted to one visit from the postman.

"I can't wait to finish here," Svartman complained. "Anything's more interesting than this, even shoe shopping with my wife…" Nordström gave him a friendly punch in the arm.

"He's been like this all day!" she laughed. For a few more minutes all four chatted together, then Stefan and Linda continued up the drive, leaving the car in full view of the house's front windows so Raakel could be in no doubt who had arrived.

She was less than pleased to see them, but stood aside and let them into the house. They sat down in the living room overlooking the quiet lake, while Raakel paced to and fro on the polished floorboards.

"Nice place you've got here," Stefan remarked.

"What do you want?" she snapped.

"Straight to the point," Stefan observed to Linda. Linda turned to Raakel and looked her hard in the eye. She found the other woman's abrasive manner irritating and decided to treat her the same way her father had done.

"We want to know more about these other houses of Lasse's that you mentioned. And everything you know about the business trips he takes. We won't leave until you tell us what we want to know."

Raakel gave them a long stare.

"You I know from yesterday," she said to Stefan. "You?" she jerked her head to Linda. "I've never met you in my life. At least tell me who you are before you start interrogating me."

"Linda Wallander, CID."

"Wallander? Wait, was it your dad who gave me such a hard time yesterday?"

"Yes, he's my dad."

"Well, tell him something from me," Raakel admonished, sinking into an armchair. "Tell him he's ruined my life. I was happy before he bulldozed his way into my life and told me all those things about the man I love. I was happy not knowing. Now I'm angry and scared and miserable thanks to him."

"So you'd prefer to stay ignorant and let those other girls suffer?" Stefan barked, his patience growing short. Raakel gazed out of the window at the lake.

"I don't know," she sighed. "I don't know what I want any more." Her manner softened and she looked at the two officers again. She appeared to be fighting back tears.

"I'll tell you what you want to know," she said softly. "I'll tell you everything."


	9. Chapter 9: The Pieces of the Puzzle

_Chapter 9: The Pieces of the Puzzle_

Monday morning arrived more quickly than the members of Ystad CID would have liked. Wallander had barely slept during the weekend and arrived at the station hollow-eyed and short in temper. Stefan and Linda both had hangovers, and Nyberg was developing a cold. It was therefore a solemn company that seated itself in the conference room at half past nine.

Wallander glanced across the table at Linda and Stefan and gave them an awkward smile. On Saturday evening he had asked Linda if she wanted him to stay at hers that night. To his surprise, he found he wasn't needed: Stefan was taking Linda home. He felt a little put out. After all, as her father, wasn't it his job to protect her? Then he decided he was being unreasonable. She was a grown-up. She could invite anyone she liked to her home. He couldn't help wondering, though, whether his daughter and Stefan were becoming more than just friends again, despite Linda's protestations to the contrary.

Stefan yawned and took a packet of painkillers out of his pocket. He swallowed a couple while he waited for the meeting to begin, and offered them to Linda, who shook her head. He put the pills back in his pocket and took a long, slow drink from his coffee. It was positively the last time he was going to drink a bottle of wine on a Sunday night. Trying to think through a case first thing on a Monday morning with a pounding headache just wasn't worth it. Linda looked to be in slightly better shape, but all the same she had surprised him with the amount she'd managed to put away. For both of them, he thought, it was a delayed reaction to Saturday's shock. Linda was unlikely to admit it, but she had been shaken by the attempted attack. She had been grateful when he had offered to go home with her on Saturday. On Sunday she had been happy enough for him to stay over again. He was fast becoming acquainted with her couch.

Wallander's mobile suddenly rang, breaking the silence that was hanging over the room. He answered the call, and after a short exchange jumped to his feet and hurried out of the room. The other three looked at each other in slight puzzlement, but said nothing. Nyberg sneezed and blew his nose. Svartman and Martinsson wandered into the room, with Holgersson following close behind.

"Where's Kurt?" she asked the assembled party. Linda shrugged.

"He got a phone call and dashed off somewhere," she said. Holgersson sighed and sat down, shaking her head. Svartman made a lame joke about Wallander being late to his own funeral. The others smiled politely. Nyberg sneezed again, and Stefan began to fidget.

Presently Wallander returned, this time bringing company.

"I'm sorry to keep you waiting," he explained to the room. "I think you all know Henrietta already."

Henrietta smiled and nodded to the assembled company and took a seat. Linda looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

"You never said she was joining us," she remarked to Wallander.

"I should have mentioned it earlier, but other things got in the way." He looked at Linda pointedly. "We need all the help we can get on cases like this and Henrietta has exactly the sort of knowledge we need here."

Holgersson nodded.

"This is a problematic case," she said. "Any help you can give us will be most appreciated."

Henrietta looked slightly embarrassed, but acknowledged their comments with good grace.

"You're very kind," she replied. "I'll do what I can to help. If we're dealing with people trafficking here then it's everybody's best interests to put a stop to it if we can."

At last the meeting began, and at last the pieces of the jigsaw began to come together.

* * *

After several long hours the team emerged from the conference room, blinking and stretching stiff limbs. They had sifted through enough evidence to guarantee long sentences for Lasse Hallström and his accomplices. The problem was finding them.

From the evidence the team had gathered so far, it seemed that people-trafficking was the latest in a long list of illegal activities that Lasse Hallström had been involved in. He had begun as a fifteen-year-old boy, dealing dope to other teenagers. This had developed into a flair for dealing, then eventually importing and transporting harder drugs. Between spells in prison he had branched out into other illegal imports: smuggled vodka, cigarettes, even a trade in stolen and counterfeit goods. Ostensibly running an import/export business, he had made quite a living from his crimes. He owned houses and apartments in Ystad, Växjö, even Gothenburg. He had been smart enough to evade the law on many occasions, but still had the trail of convictions that would be expected for a career criminal like him. During one of his stretches in prison he appeared to have been taken under Viktor Eklund's wing. The odious gangster that Wallander remembered from his early days seemed to have given him ideas, and possibly financial backing as well. Whether Lasse was part of a larger organised crime syndicate, or working purely for his own advantage was open to debate. What everyone around the table agreed on, however, was that if he could be found he would go down for a very long time.

The timeline of the crime had begun when Lasse had taken a number of business trips. According to Raakel, he had travelled regularly to Finland, Estonia and Russia. It had been on one of these trips that he'd originally met her. Perhaps even then he had been arranging the illegal transport of girls to Sweden. However, about a year prior to the discovery of the dead girl they now knew as Annushka, Lasse had made more trips east than usual. Raakel had thought nothing of it at the time, but it seemed that at this point he had smuggled girls into the country from Russia. No-one could say how many had been smuggled. The letter from the caravan suggested that girls were not just being trafficked from Russia, but neighbouring countries as well.

Lasse and his accomplices had treated the girls badly. Medical evidence from Petya and Annushka pointed to regular beatings and long-term under-nourishment. The girls seemed to have been forced into prostitution. At some point, the night before Annushka turned up dead, she had fallen out with Lasse and been beaten. She had managed to escape, but succumbed to the freezing temperature outside. Later he had lost his temper with Petya, beaten her almost to death, then disappeared, seemingly into thin air.

Of the four girls that were known to have lived at the flat in Ystad, one was dead and two had vanished. Forensic evidence from the flat and the abandoned caravan showed traces of a number of people being present. Nyberg had found some fingerprints at both scenes that were already on file as belonging to some local miscreants. At least this gave them a more forthcoming line of enquiry.

"We _have_ to find those two other girls," Holgersson insisted. "Wherever they've been hidden, they could be in serious danger."

Wallander nodded.

"Lasse has hidden them somewhere," he said. "It may be a matter of time before they end up like Petya… or Annushka. And we don't know how many other girls he might have hiding around Sweden. We owe it to all of them to stop this man. If these girls were our daughters or sisters we would want them to be set free from the misery he has caused them. We would want justice to be done. And I am going to see to it that Lasse Hallström gets what should have come to him years ago."

* * *

It was agreed that Henrietta would investigate Lasse's trips abroad with the immigration authorities, as well as looking for possible collaborators who might have supplied him with girls from Russia and Eastern Europe. She adjourned to an empty office and began to make phone calls.

Wallander had decided to raid Lasse's offices and was waiting impatiently for a warrant. Holgersson excused herself from the company, saying she would pursue the issue with the magistrate, and disappeared. Svartman and Martinsson were dispatched to speak to Annushka and Petya's neighbours once more. Every last relevant detail needed to be gathered.

This left Wallander, Nyberg, Stefan and Linda. Nyberg wanted to discuss the letter again. Its contents were very banal, seemingly a standard letter from back home, wherever home was. The first page was missing, but it had been written in a notepad and there were imprints from what had been written on the page above. To Wallander's astonishment, Nyberg had used computer imaging to extract the return address that had been written on the first page of the letter.

"How did you do that?" Wallander quizzed his colleague. Nyberg shrugged.

"It's just like rubbing the tip of a pencil over the paper to show up the marks, except you use a computer. It wasn't that hard."

"I suppose not. It was a good idea, though."

Nyberg smiled and pinned a large image of the letter to the whiteboard.

"Of course, I can't read Belarusian," he said, with a self-deprecating smile. "However, I faxed this to the translator. Speaking of whom…" He looked at his watch. "He's due here in five minutes, and I suppose I'll have to go and meet him. In the meantime, though, this is what he came up with." He handed a fax to Wallander. It gave an address in Minsk.

"We'll have to speak to Stockholm about this," said Wallander thoughtfully. "We'll need the Belarusian authorities to help us contact these people. Thank you, Nyberg."

Nyberg nodded and left for his appointment with the translator. Wallander's phone rang. His warrant to search Lasse Hallström's business premises had come through.

He looked at the other two for a moment, then made a decision.

"Linda, I need you to go and talk to Petya again. Try and get as much information as possible out of her about the other girls and the set-up in the flat."

"Me? Why?"

"She's very nervous, and I think she's more likely to trust a female officer."

"I see. She might not be up to being interviewed, you know."

"I know that. Don't push her too hard."

"Well, if you're sure…" Linda looked doubtful.

"I can go with her if you want," volunteered Stefan.

"No, Stefan, you're coming with me. We're going to go over Lasse's office with a fine toothcomb." Stefan cast a glance at Linda, then nodded to his boss. He picked up his jacket from the back of his chair and looked at Wallander with raised eyebrows.

"Well, let's go then," he said.

* * *

The silence of the room was oppressive. Linda glanced at the ceiling, then out the window, tapping her foot on the immaculate floor. The hospital smell made her feel queasy, loaded as it was with associations with previous pain and injury. What's taking them so long, she thought. This waiting is making me nervous.

Presently Doctor Bergdahl strode into the room. Linda jumped to her feet.

"She can see you now," the doctor nodded. "We've moved her to a more private room so you can talk without being disturbed, but _please_ don't tire her too much. She's recovering from a serious head injury, remember."

Linda nodded and followed him to the girl's new room. The two officers watching at the door gave her a nod as she entered. She sat down in a chair by Petya's bed. The girl acknowledged her and began pulling herself into a sitting position, to the horror of the nurse who was attending her. She looked better than she had done on Saturday morning. The doctor had been right about her: despite her horrendous injuries she was tough and was recovering already. Her ribs, however, had not healed yet, and she winced as she sat up. The nurse scolded her, helped her into a comfortable position, then left the two of them in peace.

Linda smiled. Petya attempted a smile in return; her thin face lighting up as she recognised the police officer's friendly face, the face of one of the few people who had been kind to her since she had begun her painful life in Sweden.

They exchanged pleasantries in English, then Linda knew she had to get down to business. Petya had half guessed why she had come, and looked at her gravely as she spoke.

"Petya, you probably know that I need to ask you some questions," said Linda. "Can you tell me about how you came to Sweden, and about the other girls you lived with?"

The girl nodded. For a minute or two there was silence as she collected her thoughts. Somewhere outside a motorbike revved its engine and a car door slammed. Then, with Linda's rapt attention, Petya slowly began to tell her story.


	10. Chapter 10: Where Are They Now?

_Chapter 10: Where Are They Now?_

_A/N: A longish chapter this time round, and uploaded a little later than normal, as I have been visiting the Land of No Internet Access, otherwise known as my parents' house! :) Big drama on the way after this one..._

* * *

Petya gazed out the window. Physically she was there in the room, right next to Linda, but mentally she was now a long way from this room, a long way from Ystad. A small smile formed on her lips.

"I'm from Novgorod," she began. "I lived there all my life. It's nice there, you know. I had a happy time growing up with my three brothers. We only had a little house, but it didn't matter. We were all together and our grandmother even lived on the same street."

"It sounds nice," said Linda, to which Petya nodded. "So what happened? How did you get here?"

Petya gazed back out the window. The smile on her lips became rueful and she wrung her hands together.

"When I was seventeen I was offered a job in Saint Petersburg, so I decided to move. I had to leave my family, but I was going to be working in a wonderful restaurant." She sighed, then continued. "I always wanted to be a chef – my uncle has a restaurant and I used to help him there, since I was twelve in fact. Anyway, this was a good chance for me to train as a real chef.

"I did okay, but I didn't get paid much. Sometimes it was hard to pay the rent. But then one day I met this guy who said he could get me a job in Sweden and I could earn good money and I wouldn't have to worry about rent any more. It sounded good to me, so he said he would arrange everything. Then he introduced me to Lasse." Petya broke off for a moment and gestured to the jug of water by the bed. "Please, can you give me a drink?"

Linda nodded and poured a glass of water for the girl, who took it and drank deep. When she had finished, she began her story again.

"Lasse seemed nice at first. He told jokes and he flirted with me. I thought he really liked me and he was going to get me a new job. I was worried about getting a passport and getting a visa for Sweden, but he told me he would take care of everything. He got me a fake passport and some other stuff. I don't know where he got them, but they were good. You couldn't tell they were fake.

"I was worried because of the fakes, instead of them being real ones, but he said it was okay. I should never have trusted him.

"He took me with him to Helsinki, then we got the ferry to Stockholm. When we got to Stockholm he told me to stay in the hotel room and wait for him to come back. So I waited all day for him. When he came back he was drunk and he had another girl with him. I asked him what was going on and he said this girl was going to be my flatmate, so we'd better make friends. Then he locked us in the room together and went out again." Petya looked at her hands, chewing her lip as if unsure of whether to go on.

"You're doing fine, Petya," Linda reassured her. "Go on, tell me about the other girl. Who was she?"

"Annushka." Linda could see deep sorrow etched all over the girl's thin face. The dark circles under her eyes had intensified and the strain of relating the tale was beginning to show.

"It was Annushka," Petya repeated with a sigh. "They had just brought her from Minsk and she was very scared because they had lied to her about where she was going. She didn't know what was going to happen to her. Neither did I."

"I see. Can you tell me more about Annushka? What was her surname? Did she have a family?"

"We called her Annushka, but her proper name was Anna, Anna Yankovskaya. She told me she lived with her grandmother and brother in Minsk. Her mother and father died in an accident when she was young, so her grandmother looked after her. She met one of Lasse's friends and he promised her a job in Sweden and told her she would earn a lot of money. Enough to send some back to her grandmother. She believed him and that's how she ended up getting smuggled to Stockholm. She was so young and so scared. I looked after her from then on because she needed a friend and I cared about her, but I was scared too.

"Anyway, the day after I met Annushka, Lasse made us get into a van. We were driving for a long time and then we arrived here. Lasse took us to the flat and left us there. We didn't know what to do. Next day he came back and said that because he did so much for us and brought us all the way to Sweden we had to pay him back. That's when he started making us… do things." Petya put her head in her hands and began to cry. Linda could hardly bear to see her so distressed. She put a hand on the girl's arm and tried to comfort her.

"It's all right," she said. "You won't ever have to do those things again." Petya leaned against her shoulder, sobbing. Since the day Lasse had beaten her senseless she had been alone and friendless. But with Linda and the other CID officers on her side she was no longer felt ignored and abandoned.

* * *

Stefan and Wallander arrived at the address that Wallander had retrieved from public records. Lasse Hallström's business premises were in an unremarkable little warehouse near the harbour. At Holgersson's insistence they had requested an armed unit to go into the building ahead of them, on the off-chance that an armed and not too happy Lasse might be hiding there. However, the building was empty. Wallander nodded to his colleague and they stepped through the door that the armed officers had forced open.

The cold, musty space inside was full of assorted goods, an Aladdin's cave of the illegal, the counterfeit and the purloined. Wallander made a mental inventory of the warehouse's contents, at the top of which were the dozens of boxes of cigarettes wrapped tightly in clear plastic and ready for distribution to those who didn't care about the source or purity of their tobacco as long as it was cheap. Next to the cigarettes he noted a number of large crates marked in Cyrillic letters. Having studied Lasse's file, he knew what would be in those crates, although whether it was branded as "Smirnoff" or something cheaper remained to be seen. He smiled grimly to himself and scanned the rest of the room.

Among the stacked up pallets and crates a group of cardboard boxes caught his eye. Unlike the other boxes in the warehouse, which were stacked neatly, and in some cases even labelled, these were very much the worse for wear and seemed to have been dumped carelessly by the back wall. He made for them and picked one up. It was very light and for a moment he thought perhaps it was full of packing materials, until he lifted the flap and looked inside. There were no packaging materials, but there were some women's clothes. A strange thing for their suspect to keep here, he thought, unless...

Wallander dug into the box and picked out some of the items. These clothes were not new and had been worn many times. Here on this blouse, for instance, there was a seam that had clearly come undone and been re-stitched. A T-shirt showed a small hole near the hem. Wallander stared at them with narrowed eyes. The only reason for these to be here, he thought, is that they belong to one or more of the girls that Lasse has trafficked into the country and he needed to hide them somewhere in a hurry.

He reached deeper into the box, his hand closing on something hard and rectangular: a book. He pulled it out and examined it. It appeared to be a diary, with writing in Cyrillic script. His fingers traced the lettering on the diary's inside front cover, spelling its owner's name. Over the past two or three days he had learned enough about Cyrillic to recognise some of the letters. Piecing his knowledge together, he spelt out the name for himself, nodding in satisfaction as the letters fell into place. "Annushka". The surname was too long for him to make out, but at that moment it didn't matter. What he was holding was another piece of the puzzle, a window into the life of their dead victim.

He called to his colleague through the stockroom's dead air. "Stefan? Come and look at this."

In a few moments Stefan was at his side, peering at the diary.

"Where did you find that?" he asked, taking the book and leafing through it.

"In this pile of boxes. They seem to be full of clothes." Wallander held up a short skirt. Stefan raised his eyebrows.

"Three guesses who this stuff belongs to," said Wallander. Stefan nodded.

"More work for Nyberg, then. And this?" he held up the diary. Wallander took it and showed him the writing inside the cover.

"Annushka's," he explained. "If nothing else, it will tell us something about who she was."

"But it won't tell us where Lasse's disappeared to, will it?"

"No. But perhaps something in here might."

"The computer," said Stefan. "He's got an office upstairs. There's a computer and a filing cabinet. He wasn't expecting us to visit. Maybe there's more in there than he would want us to see."

Wallander nodded. They climbed the stairs to the dusty office, paying no further heed to the contents of the warehouse below.

* * *

Once again it was dark outside and all was quiet inside the station. Wallander paced slowly around the room trying to assimilate what seemed to be an endless amount of information. Names, dates, locations, eyewitness reports, interview transcripts, crime scene reports, photographs: in his mind he shuffled them around unceasingly, looking for anything that would help him. Was there something he was missing? Had he overlooked some small clue to the whereabouts of their miscreant and his victims? He was unsure of what he was supposed to see, and it was giving him a headache.

He had had a long conversation with Linda, where they had discussed what Petya had told her. Thanks to her, he now had an understanding of who their two victims were and how they had been sucked into this sordid mess. Once she had finished comforting the distraught girl, Linda had had the wits to ask her for names and dates, information that Wallander and Henrietta had pounced on immediately. Henrietta had recognised the name of Lasse's contact in Russia, and with a glint in her eye had returned to her office to make yet another phone call and check some records. Within half an hour she had announced that she had spoken to a contact in Russia and a raid was being planned on his property.

"We've been after that lowlife for months!" she exclaimed. Wallander smiled back at her, secretly envious of her ability to get results so quickly.

He himself was more interested in the two missing girls. According to Petya they were a pair of sisters from Ukraine. Petya thought they had come from L'Viv. Their names were Iryna and Vira. Now he had their names and descriptions he had circulated them around Skåne. The likelihood of any sightings, however, was minimal.

He sighed. Somewhere in this mass of forensics, interviews and computer records was a clue to the missing girls' location. There _had_ to be.

Nyberg put his head round the door, interrupting Wallander's musings.

"I'm going home now," he said, wiping a drip from the end of his nose with a battered tissue.

"Fine, fine. I'll see you tomorrow."

Nyberg tossed a bundle of papers onto the table.

"I thought you might want to see these before I go." His curiosity piqued, Wallander picked up the bundle and leafed through it.

"Anything unusual?"

"Not particularly. The Customs people will be interested in the goods he had in that warehouse. Beyond that we've got the usual traces: fingerprints, hair, all that stuff. I gave the computer to Martinsson to look at; he's already going through Hallström's bank records."

"Oh, okay."

"There was one small thing though," Nyberg continued, coughing hoarsely.

"Yes?"

"Straw."

"Straw?"

"Yes, we found wisps of straw all over the warehouse floor, and there was a bale of the stuff by the back door. It caught my eye, and I thought it was strange, because I also found some strands of it in that filthy caravan you gave me to look at." He coughed again and returned the stare that Wallander was giving him. "Do you think it's important?"

Wallander shook his head.

"I don't know, Nyberg. I don't know. I hope it doesn't mean that Lasse is also smuggling animals. That would complicate things even further."

Nyberg shrugged.

"Who knows," he coughed. "Anyway, I'm going to die of bronchitis if I stay here. I'm going home to my bed. I'll see you tomorrow, if I make it through the night."

Wallander smiled after his departing colleague, then resumed his pacing. He found it helped him think.

Straw. For some reason a spark had ignited in his mind. He felt that there was something, some tiny detail somewhere, something that somebody had said, that connected. Something that would explain why Lasse had a bale of straw in his warehouse. But whatever it was, it refused to come into his mind. He would have to sleep on it.

Grumbling quietly to himself, he picked up his jacket and made his way to the door. Henrietta stepped out of her office and they looked at each other in surprise.

"Still here?" she asked.

"Unfortunately, yes." Wallander yawned, and rubbed at the ache in the back of his head. "It's been a long day. Would you like to come for a drink with me?" The invitation slipped out unbidden, but Henrietta looked grateful rather than put off.

"Why not indeed?" she smiled.

"Good. Shall we go to my place?"

She nodded cheerfully and they headed off together to Wallander's flat, where a bottle of red wine awaited them.

* * *

The wine was relaxing and the conversation flowed freely between Wallander and Henrietta, as if they were old friends. At first they discussed the case. From speaking to a number of contacts and authorities, Henrietta had already pieced together an amazing amount of Lasse's activity during the previous year and a half. What puzzled her was how he had made so many trips in such a short space of time. She had some records of ferry bookings he had made, but not enough to account for all the trips he needed to have taken.

"He's clever, I'll give him that," she said, sipping her wine. "There's something we're not seeing here."

"I know the feeling." Wallander sank deeper into his armchair. "I _know_ there's something I've overlooked, but I can't work out what it is. You know the police in Växjö and Gothenburg paid Lasse's other properties a visit for us? There wasn't a sign of anything untoward. One of the houses was empty; the other two were let out to people. Everything above board. We've checked every property we know to be in his name and nothing. He's got some bolt-hole we know nothing about."

He shook his head and offered Henrietta more wine. They both drank another glass and gradually the case was forgotten about for a while and they discussed lighter subjects. Eventually Henrietta looked at her watch and protested that she really needed to go. Wallander saw her off in a taxi and cleared the wine glasses.

As he ran hot water over one of the glasses, his phone rang. Drying his hands on a tea-towel he moved into the living room and picked up the handset. It was Linda.

"Dad, I've had a call from Raakel. Someone's been making threatening phone calls and she's worried. I'm going over now. There's still a patrol car watching the place, isn't there?"

"Yes, I think Hansson and Elofsson are up there tonight. But be careful, yes? You've already had a narrow escape."

"I'll be fine, Dad." The line went dead as Linda hung up. Wallander replaced the handset and finished washing the glasses. Then he went to bed, letting out a grateful sigh as he pulled the covers over his body and sank into his pillow.

He had been asleep for barely thirty minutes when the phone rang, jolting him from the welcome doze that had overtaken him. He groped blindly for the extension that sat by his bed, and picked it up, holding it to his ear.

"Hmn?" he mumbled.

"Kurt?" Martinsson's voice cut through his drowsiness like a blade. Something was terribly wrong.

"Yes? What's happened?" Wallander hoisted himself upright, his heart suddenly racing at a sickening speed.

"It's Linda," Martinsson's voice had a note of panic. "She's been abducted."


	11. Chapter 11: The Crisis

_Chapter 11: The Crisis_

Wallander sat bolt upright, a chill spreading through his body, as if the blood were freezing in his veins.

"What do you mean, 'abducted'?" he shouted down the phone, a dozen horrifying scenarios already playing out in his mind.

"She's been abducted from Hallström's place. You know she was up there because that girlfriend of his was being bothered by threatening calls? The two we had in the patrol car were distracted by something, I don't know what, but the next thing they know, some big off-road vehicle comes charging past them. When they got up to the house, Linda's car was sitting there abandoned and both the women were gone. Kurt, I'm sorry…"

"Who's up there now?" Wallander cut in, trying desperately to slow his heart rate so he could think clearly.

"Stefan and Svartman are on their way and some of the forensics team are there. So's Holgersson."

"Come and pick me up. I need to be there." Wallander crashed the handset back onto the phone. He struggled out of bed and began to get dressed, his mind racing.

He had known they were dealing with a dangerous man. He had known what this brute was capable of. So why had he let Linda go up there on her own late at night? He ought to have realised that something like this would happen. If Linda came to any harm he would never forgive himself.

Presently he heard an engine running in the street outside. Glancing out the window, he saw Martinsson's car waiting for him. He ran out to it and climbed in.

"Come on, let's go," he said, curtly.

Martinsson drove quickly through the deserted streets and made for the country road where Lasse's cottage stood. The journey was conducted in silence. Wallander fidgeted impatiently, wishing desperately that they could get there more quickly. Martinsson cast a worried glance at him, but said nothing.

At last they arrived at the cottage. There was already a squadron of police cars parked outside and a group of officers was conferring over the bonnet of Linda's abandoned car. Lisa Holgersson paced uneasily up and down talking into her phone, while Stefan and Hansson held a heated debate about who was responsible.

Stefan looked round abruptly when he heard Martinsson's car approach. As Wallander got out and surveyed the scene he broke off his argument and strode over.

"Kurt!" he shouted.

"Stefan, what happened? Did anyone see anything?"

Stefan shook his head, running his hands through his hair in a gesture of anguished uncertainty. The expression on his face told its own story.

"Nobody saw anything. Hansson was asleep," he threw an accusatory glance toward the uniformed officer. "Elofsson decided he had to pee, so he went into the woods. He was coming back to the car when he saw a Range Rover speeding down the drive. If both of them had been doing what they were sent here to do, this wouldn't have happened." His voice rose to a shout and he gazed back at the two offending officers.

Wallander nodded, glancing round at the activity going on around him, a feeling of utter helplessness seizing him. What were they going to do? How would they get Linda back? He simply didn't know.

Holgersson finished her phone call and came over to him.

"Kurt, I'm so sorry," she said. "We're doing everything we can to find her."

"It's my fault," said Wallander, shaking his head. "She called to tell me she was coming up here. I shouldn't have let her come on her own: I should have insisted that she take someone."

"This isn't your fault, Kurt!" Holgersson said. "She was the one who answered the woman's call and drove up here."

"I should have been here with her," Stefan said quietly. They both looked at him and he continued. "If I hadn't gone home before she did I would have gone with her. I could have stopped her being snatched."

"This isn't anyone's fault. Now come on, we don't have time for this," Holgersson waved their protestations away. Having one of her officers snatched by a suspect wasn't good for her either. She needed a quick resolution, otherwise the alternative didn't bear thinking about.

"Come on, we need to do what we can to find her before it's too late," she said quietly.

* * *

Linda struggled in the darkness as the car hurtled along the winding country roads of Skåne. The handcuffs chaining her to the car door chafed her wrist and although she had tried, she was unable to loosen or break out of them. She was at the mercy of the two men.

"You'll sit still if you know what's good for you, you stupid interfering cow!" the man in the passenger seat growled at her. He had a harsh, unpleasant voice that grated on her nerves. It was he who had forced her into the car, the cold muzzle of a gun pressed against her temple. She shuddered at the thought of what the men might be about to do to her.

And where was Raakel? When she had arrived at the house there had been no sign of her. Perhaps the men had already disposed of her. Linda shuddered again and tried to come up with some kind of plan for getting out of this situation, but things were looking very unpromising. By now, she supposed, her colleagues would know of her disappearance, but would they be able to find her in time? She doubted it. If she herself had no idea where she was being taken, how could the others even hope to discover her whereabouts?

The car jerked to a sudden halt and all was quiet for a split second. Linda strained through the darkness to see where they were. There appeared to be forest all round, but beyond that there were no clues to their location. The two men climbed out of the car and left her for a moment. She could hear muffled screams coming from somewhere. It was a few seconds before she realised that they were coming from the boot of the car. Raakel. It had to be. She felt a small wave of relief wash over her. At least she was still alive.

The men came back to the car. They opened the boot and Linda heard raised voices as they dragged Raakel out.

"Where the hell are you taking me?" she heard Raakel shriek.

"Just shut up and get in the van!" replied the man with the gun. Linda knew he was holding it against the other woman's head, the cold metal barrel pressed tight to her skull. How did I get into this mess, she thought, how did I go from helping one of Lasse's victims to being a victim myself?

The car door opposite her flew open and the man with the gun slid in beside her.

"Don't move, don't scream," he growled, reaching over and unfastening her handcuffs. Pressing the gun against her head he ordered her out of the car and she obeyed. He walked her to a van that was waiting a little way down the road and pushed her inside, slamming and locking the door behind her. The van took off, hurtling its two unwilling passengers to an unknown destination.

* * *

Wallander had locked himself in his office. All the information available to him was spread out over his desk and he tried desperately to see what it was he had missed. His head ached. He felt heavy with exhaustion, but now was no time to sleep. If he didn't solve this puzzle, he was certain that Linda would die. He lit a cigarette and paced round the room. The missing piece was somewhere, but where?

After a while there was a knock on the door. Wallander ignored it. He was now scribbling notes on a scrap of paper. He couldn't afford to lose his train of thought. There was another knock.

"Kurt?" a voice called. It sounded like Stefan. "Kurt, can I talk to you?"

Wallander ignored him and continued writing. There was another knock.

"Kurt, open the door!" This time it was Holgersson. He rubbed his face wearily, then moved to the door and unlocked it.

"Kurt, go home and have a rest!" Holgersson ordered.

"What would be the point in that?" he snapped, suddenly furious with her for no good reason. "I don't need to rest; I need to find where that man has taken Linda."

He strode back into his office. A glance at the clock told him the time was 6:30. It had been a long and fruitless night, but he was certain that going home would help no-one. It certainly wouldn't help him. He needed to be here, at the centre of things.

"At least go to the break room and have a rest, then," Holgersson insisted from the doorway. "I've called a meeting for eight o'clock. We can discuss our position then."

"Our position is that one of our officers – my daughter – is in grave danger!" Wallander shouted. He sank into his chair and put his head in his hands.

Holgersson came into the room and stood by him, her hand on his shoulder.

"Please Kurt, have a rest. It will help us all if you're thinking more clearly."

He looked up at her. There was real concern in her normally steely blue eyes. He had sometimes wondered how much empathy she really had for her colleagues and subordinates, but this time she was genuinely troubled. He nodded to her and pushed his chair back.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. I'll go and have some coffee."

He shambled off in the direction of the break room. Holgersson and Stefan looked at each other.

"I should be sending you with him," Holgersson said. "You've been here all night."

Stefan shook his head.

"I'm fine. I need to be here." He jerked his head in the direction of Wallander's untidy desk. "Let me have a look at what he's got. I might see something he doesn't."

Holgersson nodded and left the room, glancing back at him from the doorway. He sat in Wallander's chair and began to work through the piles of paper and scribbled notes.

* * *

Stefan had been staring at the collected evidence for nearly three quarters of an hour. He had taken it to his own desk, to sift through in comfort. He knew that Wallander would not be happy about this, but at the moment all that mattered was finding what they'd previously missed.

He paused and rubbed his eyes, which were heavy and sore. During his life he had suffered through worse nights, but last night still took some beating. He felt like there was a rock where his heart should be. He should have been there with Linda last night, then she would still be here, safe and sound and complaining about her dad's interference in her life. His mouth twisted into a bitter little smile at the thought.

If Lasse Hallström has so much as touched a hair on her head, he thought, I personally will make sure he wishes he had never been born.

He sighed and sat up, rubbing the back of his neck. There were two things that had not yet been added to this pile of evidence. One was the contents of Lasse's computer; the other was the bank statements that Martinsson was supposed to have been working on. He got up and wandered to Martinsson's office. Martinsson had just come in and was wearily removing his jacket. Stefan sat down and asked him about Lasse's bank statements and computer files.

Half an hour later, he had the beginnings of a theory. Whether it would be of any use remained to be seen.

* * *

At eight o'clock everyone gathered in the conference room. Wallander looked groggy and was clutching a large cup of coffee. Stefan refused to sit, but instead stood gazing out the window. Nyberg announced his presence with a series of loud coughs. In ordinary circumstances Holgersson would have told him to go home, but these were not ordinary circumstances.

Wallander summarised the situation and what they already knew. Linda had been snatched by one of Lasse's henchmen, who had bundled her into a large off-road vehicle. Forensics confirmed that the tyre tracks left behind were from a Range Rover. The tracks showed that the car had come from the woods rather than the road. It was this element of surprise that had allowed the driver so easily to bypass Hansson and Elofsson in the patrol car. Inside the cottage there were signs of a struggle, but no body, which implied that Raakel had also been taken in the same way. Wherever Linda was, Raakel was probably there too. Wherever they both were, it was likely that Lasse would also be there. Everybody in the room understood the importance of getting to Linda and Raakel. Lasse would not hesitate to do to them what he had already done to at least two other women.

Wallander sat back, the last of his energy sapped.

"Has anyone got anything to add?" he asked the others. "Any ideas? Anything I've overlooked?"

The room was quiet for a minute. Nyberg coughed. Stefan looked up, as if he'd suddenly realised that Wallander had stopped talking.

"Did you know that Lasse has been making regular monthly payments to someone called Ylva Bergman? He also has her accounts on his computer, isn't that right, Martinsson?"

Martinsson nodded in agreement. For the first time that morning Wallander looked even slightly hopeful.

"Go on," he nodded.

"There must be a reason Lasse has her accounts and pays her money. They must be pretty close. If we find this person, she might bring us a step closer to his whereabouts"

Wallander nodded.

"Stefan, you and Martinsson start looking. Now! Go!"

The two glanced at each other and hurried from the room. Wallander got up and looked at Holgersson, who had said nothing during the meeting.

"We've got a long list of known criminals who we can prove visited the girls at their flat," he said to her. "I'm going to bring them in. One of them must know something abut where Lasse's gone to ground."

He hastened from the room. Time was not his friend. It was snapping at his heels.

* * *

Linda was gradually aware of the darkness growing less. Looking up at the dingy cobwebbed window she could see dawn creeping across the sky. Glancing around her, she now realised that she was in some kind of shed. What looked like gardening tools were hung up round the walls and she could just make out pieces of leather harness hanging on hooks near the door.

It was cold in here. She fidgeted, trying to keep warm, but her toes were already numb. She worked at the ropes binding her hands. They were so tight that the rough fibres bit painfully into her skin, but she would not be beaten yet. Struggling to her feet she found a hook at wrist height in the wall and scraped the strands of rope against it over and over again.

She couldn't say how long it took to fray the ropes. By the time the strand weakened and broke and she had freed herself it was properly light outside. Rubbing her wrists, she staggered to the window and looked out. Outside was a world of white. It had snowed again during the night and the drifts lay thick against the trunks of the trees that were visible from the window. It was very quiet.

I'm in the country, she thought. I could be anywhere in Skåne. How am I going to get away from this place?

The silence was suddenly shattered by barking. Two dogs, or maybe three. They were coming closer. There was the crunch of footsteps in the snow outside. Linda froze. Someone was unlocking the shed door.


	12. Chapter 12: The Missing Piece

_Chapter 12: The Missing Piece_

Wallander was losing his voice. He had so far conducted three interviews, to no avail. This was the fourth, and the shiftless delinquent squirming in the seat in front of him appeared to have no more information than the previous three.

"I don't know what you want me to tell you," he said, his gaze shifting from the floor to Wallander's face, then back to the floor again. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. "Yeah, sure, I went to – uh – visit the girls a couple of times. If you're going to charge me with that, then just get on with it." He leaned on the table and glared at Wallander.

"Don't worry, I will. We're going to throw the book at anyone we can prove was involved with those girls. But right now I need more information about Lasse. I know you're an old associate of his. If you know where he is, tell me. It's a matter of life and death." Aware that he was now almost pleading with the unappealing young man, Wallander stopped.

The man smirked.

"Something's really wound you lot up, hasn't it?" he said. "Look, inspector, the only way to be sure of anything as far as Lasse's concerned is to ask him yourself. Get it 'straight from the horse's mouth', if you like. I have no idea where Lasse is, haven't seen him for a couple of weeks. Sorry and all that."

Wallander terminated the interview. Leaving one of the uniformed officers to charge the man for buying sexual services, he returned to his office. He sat at his desk and gazed out the window. It seemed they were as far as they ever were from locating Lasse and Linda.

He opened his desk drawer and took out a framed photo. It had been taken on Linda's seventeenth birthday, and before she had joined the force in Ystad he had kept it out on his desk. He stared at it for a long time, trying to fight the lump that was forming in his throat.

* * *

Nyberg, poorly as he was, had decided to take one last look at the evidence he had gathered. He needed to be sure that he had examined everything. Perhaps his colleague's life depended on it.

He started with the caravan, taking Svartman along with him. It always helped to have a fresh pair of eyes to look over something, and Svartman would also be able to help him with anything that might require some physical exertion. They had already established that the caravan had been in Lasse's possession: apart from the ring that Stefan had found, Petya and Annushka's neighbours had often seen it in the street outside the flat, and it was covered in Lasse's fingerprints.

The two men surveyed the vehicle. Svartman was distinctly unimpressed.

"He didn't make the girls sleep in here, did he?"

"We're not sure," said Nyberg, suppressing a cough. "The neighbours saw it around a lot, but it came and went. It looks like he took it into the country a lot, if the mud ingrained in the carpet is anything to go by."

Svartman screwed up his face and walked round the dingy caravan, squinting in the windows.

"If only we had a number plate," he muttered. A vehicle registration would tell them a number of useful things, if only they could find one. Lasse had clearly not wanted the caravan to be traced to him. If it wasn't for Annushka's ring, Svartman realised, they would probably never have made the connection.

He examined the charred paintwork on the exterior. It seemed that at some point someone had tried to give the vehicle a new paint job. He took a penknife out of his pocket and scraped at the burnt topcoat. It flaked off, exposing a beige layer underneath. He didn't suppose the paintwork was of any importance to the case, but perhaps the lab might be able to tell them something about it. Nyberg handed him a plastic back for the scrapings.

With some reluctance, Nyberg climbed into the dim interior and began to re-examine the carpet and upholstery. Svartman continued his scrutiny of the bodywork. He scraped at the corner of one of the windows, where the paint had covered the glass. The re-spray had been done particularly carelessly, he thought. The paint came away under his blade and it was then that he noticed something scratched on the corner of the pane. He looked closer, and caught his breath. He banged on the window, gesturing to Nyberg to come and look.

"What is it?" asked Nyberg, wiping his dripping nose.

Svartman pointed to the etched letters and numbers that he had found on the glass.

"What's this?"

Nyberg looked closer, then took a small magnifying glass out of his pocket. He examined the etching at length. At length, he spoke.

"It's a security code," he said. "Someone at some point has registered this caravan with one of those vehicle recovery schemes. They put an identifying code on it, like this one, then if it gets stolen it's theoretically easier to identify it and return it to its owner when it turns up again. You realise what this means?"

A glance passed between the two men.

"We can use this to find the vehicle registration?" Svartman ventured.

Nyberg nodded thoughtfully.

"It might not be much, but it takes us one step closer to Hallström."

* * *

It was 12:30 before Stefan realised that he had eaten nothing all day. He looked up from his computer at the empty space where Linda normally sat, and sighed. The heaviness in his chest was lessened only slightly by the pain gnawing at his empty stomach. His search for the mysterious Ylva Bergman was leading him somewhere, he could see, but there was still a long way to go before he got what he was looking for. Lasse had been making payments to her for as long as he had held an account with the local bank. Her own account was not with the branch in Ystad, but was held with a bank in Växjö. Växjö again, he thought. But we tried looking there already and found nothing.

Martinsson came into the room, carrying a box of sandwiches.

"Here you go," he said, placing them on Stefan's desk. "I thought you might want lunch."

"Thanks." Stefan gave his colleague a nod.

"Still trying to find the Bergman woman?"

"Yeah." Stefan ran his hands through his hair. "We have the number of her bank account, but that's as far as it goes. She's not in the criminal records database. I wish I knew where else to look."

"Have you tried the internet?"

"The internet?" It was such an obvious suggestion, but one that he had completely overlooked. He could have kicked himself.

"Everyone's on the internet these days," said Martinsson, sitting in Linda's empty seat. "Even my wife has a site for her photography." He leafed through the print-outs that Stefan had already made of his findings, engrossed in the twisted trail that was their suspect's finances.

Stefan opened a search engine on his internet browser and began to type. It took several attempts to narrow down the list of results: there appeared to be a lot of women out there named Ylva Bergman. He narrowed the search to Skåne, but this still left a number of possibilities, none of whom seemed to have an obvious link with Lasse Hallström. Stefan printed a few pages of search results. They would all have to be investigated, he supposed. Where would they begin? There certainly wasn't time for this.

* * *

There was a soft knock on Wallander's door and Henrietta let herself in. She gave him a small, sympathetic smile and sat down.

"Can I get you anything?" she said.

He shook his head.

"I'm not hungry. Thank you." He resumed gazing at the carpet.

"Is there _anything_ I can to help?"

He could see she was feeling like an outsider in this situation. He could see she wanted to make things better. But unless she could tell him where Linda was, there was nothing she could do to help him. He shook his head again.

"No. Not unless you can lead me to Lasse Hallström."

"I can't do that." She sighed and they sat in silence for a minute. "I've been doing a lot of thinking, though. Remember I couldn't work out how he'd managed to be all the places we know he's been in the last few years? Not enough stamps on his passport and certainly not enough ferry bookings and other proof that he travelled. Well, one way he could have made all those trips would be if he had his own boat."

"Go on." She had his attention.

"Think about it. We know he brought the Russian and Belarusian girls here by the ferry, but what if he has his own boat that he uses for some of these trips – not all of them, obviously, otherwise his comings and goings would probably be noticed – but it would make it much easier for him to get across the Baltic and pick up people. And whatever goods he wanted to smuggle as well."

"If he does have a boat, I wonder why it's not been picked up on before"

"Well, as I say, he maybe doesn't use it all the time. Besides, we know how devious he is. It might be registered in someone else's name."

Wallander nodded and began to make some notes.

"If any of this actually is the case, he might be in hiding somewhere on the coast. It could be worth looking by the sea for his hideout," Henrietta suggested.

"Sweden has three thousand kilometres of coast. Where do you suggest we start looking?" Wallander snapped. When he saw the expression on Henrietta's face, he immediately regretted the outburst. "I'm sorry. That was uncalled for."

"Yes, it was. But I'll let you off just this once." She smiled at him, a caring smile, and he wished they were talking in happier circumstances.

* * *

It seemed that everyone had converged on Wallander's office at once. First Nyberg and Svartman had arrived, carrying photographs, database printouts and faxes. Just as Wallander had begun asking them for an explanation, there was another knock at the door and Stefan let himself in, followed shortly by Martinsson. Henrietta had never left, and was still ensconced in her seat, looking over a fax that had come through on Wallander's machine. With six of them in the room, space was at a premium, and everyone wanted to talk at once.

Wallander tried to impose some order on the group.

"One at a time!" he shouted. "Nyberg, you were here first. What do you have?"

Nyberg laid a bundle of photos and papers on the desk.

"We thought you might like to know that we traced a vehicle registration for that abandoned caravan."

"How? Did you find number plates?"

"No. But we found a security code etched on one of the windows. A few years ago the caravan was registered with a national vehicle recovery scheme in case of theft. We've checked their register. According to the records, the owner was one Ylva Bergman."

The room went quiet. Wallander sat down and rested his chin on his hands. The mysterious fru Bergman again.

"Did you get an address for her?"

A look passed between Nyberg and Svartman.

"Yes and no," Svartman hesitated. "The address she gave was in Växjö. One of Lasse's properties."

To the others it was as if the life had been sucked from Wallander's body. He slumped in his seat and closed his eyes.

"Every time we think we're getting somewhere we run into a brick wall," he said quietly.

Holgersson's head appeared round the office door. Her face registered some surprise at finding so many people in the room.

"What's going on?" she asked. "Have you found something?"

"Possibly," said Stefan.

"Come in to the conference room," she said. "If you have any new information I need to hear it."

Once the group had reconvened in the conference room, Stefan presented his findings.

"Whoever this Bergman woman is," he said, "She's obviously closely linked to Lasse in some way. Why else would he pay her 22,000 kronor a month?"

"Blackmail?" suggested Svartman.

Stefan shook his head.

"It can't be. Why would he be using her caravan if she was blackmailing him?"

Wallander shuffled the papers on the table in front of him. A thought had just occurred to him.

"What do we know of Lasse's family?" he asked. Blank faces. Stefan shrugged. Wallander sighed and continued his train of thought.

"What if this woman, instead of being a blackmailer, is a relative? Then the monthly payments might make sense."

"Alimony," said Martinsson. "She's his ex wife."

"Or his _mother_. Perhaps he's being a good son and supporting his mother."

To Wallander, it seemed as if the floodgates had finally opened. He took the list of search results that Stefan had given him and scanned it. According to the internet, Ylva Bergman was a doctor, a director of children's services in Helsingborg, an artist, a horse breeder… He stopped. What was it that the unpleasant young man had told him this morning? That he needed to get the information "straight from the horse's mouth". In a way, perhaps it was a cryptic clue. And what about the straw that Nyberg had found in the warehouse and the caravan? He had been groping for something that had known was there, something that would explain the presence of the straw. Now at last, at long last, it came to him.

"Stefan!" he said. "Do you remember when we went to Lasse's house? When we first met Raakel?"

The younger man nodded.

"Of course. It's hard to forget when someone answers the door to you with a gun in their hand."

"What did you notice in the house?"

Stefan shrugged.

"It's nice enough. View over the lake, wooden floors, pictures on the walls…"

"Including pictures of horses," said Wallander. "Specifically, photographs of prize-winning animals from…" he searched through Stefan's printouts until he found the right page, and read from it. "…'The Bergman Stud, two kilometres from Simrishamn, on the road to Ystad'."

Suddenly his heart was racing. He looked triumphantly round the room.

"We've found her. And I would be willing to bet my life that Lasse is at that stud farm right now, with Linda and the others."

* * *

Linda scrambled through the snow, casting a hasty glance back to the dark shed where the hefty man lay, a purple bruise on his forehead where she had hit him with the first implement that had come to hand: a spade. She had tied him up, but it wouldn't be long before he came round and started to shout. The dogs – there were three of them, all Rottweilers – strained on their tethers and sent a deafening volley of barks after her.

Beyond the trees, she could see the farmhouse. Were Raakel and the girls in there, or did Lasse have them imprisoned elsewhere? She ducked under the cover of the trees and studied the house. Eventually someone would wonder why the man in the shed hadn't returned and would go looking for him. It wasn't safe to stay here, but Linda couldn't see how she would get away.

She searched her pockets, but they had taken her phone. She cursed them. When she was sure nobody was watching from the windows, she dived across the yard to the house, and crouched under what she took to be the kitchen window. There were raised voices inside and with relief she recognised Raakel's Finnish accent. The woman was still very much alive.

The dogs had stopped barking, but somewhere in the distance a horse neighed. From the direction of the trees a bird cried out in alarm. Linda barely had time to duck for cover behind an abandoned car before a man came out of the woods carrying a rifle. Linda held her breath and looked up at the face of the man she recognised from so many file photographs. She had found Lasse Hallström. Or more accurately, Lasse Hallström had found her.


	13. Chapter 13: Tracks in the Snow

_Chapter 13: Tracks in the Snow_

A/N: A long chapter, it took a while to write! I think there will be one more chapter after this one, just to tie up all the loose ends :)

* * *

He looked older in the flesh than in his file photographs. His black hair was criss-crossed with occasional strands of silver and lines were visible round his eyes, but the expression on his face – the fixed stare – was unchanged. He surveyed the scene in front of him and walked with deliberate steps to the rusty car that was concealing Linda. He had caught a glimpse of her sudden movement from the corner of his eye. Lasse knew who he would find crouching there in the snow.

He rounded the Volvo's mouldering wreck and stared down at her. Linda found herself momentarily frozen, unable to tear her gaze from Lasse. He appeared to be sizing her up, making a dispassionate judgement about her the way he might have judged a horse or a new car. After a moment he slowly pointed the rifle at her.

"Get up." He spoke softly, but the words were loaded with menace. Linda got to her feet. Lasse twitched the rifle in the direction of the kitchen door.

"In the house."

Linda obeyed. Inside the kitchen she found Raakel sitting in a dining chair, watched over by one of the previous night's abductors. She looked frightened, but otherwise unharmed.

"Sit down," said Lasse's voice from the doorway. The heavy-set man, who had been leaning against the wall, pulled a chair up behind Linda and pushed her into it.

"Are you okay?" Raakel mouthed. Linda nodded.

"She's fine," said Lasse, coming into the kitchen and setting the rifle down in the corner. "Her problem is that she doesn't have the good sense to stay where she's put."

Her leaned over Linda and grabbed her chin, tilting her face towards his.

"It's a pity," he breathed. "I like your face. I would hate to have to do anything to it, I really would. But bad things happen to people who don't do what I tell them."

"So you admit you're responsible for what happened to Petya and Annushka?" Linda was trying her hardest to keep her voice steady. Her heart was racing and her palms had begun to sweat, but she knew she had to stay calm. If Lasse knew how frightened she was, it would only give him more power over her.

Lasse straightened up with a sigh.

"If they'd been good little girls and done what I told them I'd have made sure nothing bad happened to them," he said. "But they didn't behave themselves, you see, so I had to punish them."

For a moment he seemed almost sorrowful. Linda wondered how much he really believed what he was saying. Was his grip on reality really so tenuous, or did he actually know exactly what he was doing? Linda suspected the latter. She swallowed, although her mouth was dry.

"And what have you done with the other two girls? We know there were at least two more."

Lasse looked at her for a moment through narrowed eyes.

"You'll get to meet them soon enough," he said. His tone of voice turned her blood cold.

"Lasse, for the love of God!" cried Raakel. "Just let us go!"

"Why would I do that?"

"You wouldn't hurt _me_, would you? You love me." Linda sensed that Raakel was searching desperately for a way out. She flinched as Lasse slapped Raakel across the face.

"You're hardly in the position to talk about love!" He grabbed her shoulders, pushing his face right up next to hers. "You gave up that right when you started spilling your guts to the police. If I'd known you were that disloyal I'd have sent you back to Helsinki in a box."

"Please, Lasse," Raakel begged. "I didn't exactly have a choice, they made me talk. I was so scared. That inspector – Wallander – he threatened me." She glanced at Linda. It was all lies, of course, but Raakel was quite a convincing liar. She pulled up a sleeve to reveal a large bruise on her arm.

"Look! He did this! He said he would do more if I didn't talk to them."

Linda knew for a fact that her father had done no such thing, but Raakel's performance seemed to have placated Lasse. He nodded thoughtfully. He seemed to be about to say something, but at that moment there was a yell from the direction of the shed and the dogs began to bark again. The man that Linda had incapacitated had woken up. Lasse sent his henchman out to him, then he grabbed Linda and pulled her out of the chair.

"You wondered what happened to the other two girls I had?" he said. "Come with me and I'll show you." He pushed her towards a doorway that led into the hall. "You stay here," he ordered Raakel, glancing back at her. She nodded silently, clinging to the seat of her chair.

"Don't try anything," Lasse warned Linda as he shoved her up the stairs. She felt the muzzle of a gun being pressed into her back. They climbed two flights of stairs to the attic. Lasse took out a key and unlocked the door. He pushed it open and propelled her into the cold and dusty room.

Two teenage girls crouched in the far corner, expressions of absolute terror on their faces.

"Meet Iryna and Vira," said Lasse, as if he we introducing them at a dinner party. "You can get to know each other. I'll be back for you in a little while, officer."

The door slammed shut and the key turned in the lock.

* * *

Again and again Stefan spun his car wildly into corners and through gaps in the traffic as he raced out of town and towards Simrishamn. In the passenger seat, Wallander clung on, praying that they were not already too late. Had Stefan driven like this on any normal day Wallander would have given him a lecture on responsible driving, but this time he said nothing. Speed was of the essence.

Once they had pinpointed exactly where they were going, it had taken next to no time for things to start happening. An armed response unit had been summoned and was on its way to the stud farm along with Stefan and Wallander and a convoy of patrol cars. Holgersson was following behind. She had called in as many reinforcements as could be mustered from the surrounding area. Soon, very soon, the little farm by the coast would not know what had hit it.

Stefan swore loudly as he tried and failed to change gear. Manhandling the gear stick, he managed at last to grind the car into the correct gear. He was on a knife edge, thought Wallander. The smallest thing might set him off.

"Stay calm, Stefan," he warned. "I need you to keep calm."

"What do you mean, 'keep calm'?" Stefan shouted. "How can I keep calm? For the last sixteen hours all we've done is worry about Linda!"

"I know, I know." Wallander took a deep breath and rubbed his aching forehead. "But we both need to keep calm. It's not going to help Linda if either of us loses it now."

Stefan said nothing and stared at the road. His grip on the steering wheel was so tight that his knuckles gleamed white under the skin of his hands. He accelerated even harder, his rear view mirror full of blue and red flashing lights.

* * *

Vira and Iryna spoke no Swedish and very little English. As best she could, Linda tried to calm them. The younger girl, Iryna, had a split lip and was nursing an injured arm. Linda knelt next to her and examined the arm as the girl bit her lip and held back tears.

"I think it's broken," Linda said to her in English.

"Broken?" Vira echoed.

Linda nodded, noticing how thin both girls were.

"We need to get you both to a hospital," she said. She racked her brains, looking for a way out of the hellhole that the three of them had found themselves in. She took off her jacket and draped it over Iryna, who was shivering. How long had the two girls been in this dank attic? Too long, she thought. Any length of time in here was too long.

She got up and paced round the attic, stopping under a skylight, which was overgrown with cobwebs. There might be a way of getting it open and climbing onto the roof, but then what? How on earth would they get down without being noticed?

She had no time to ponder the problem. Footsteps came rapidly up the stairs and a key rattled in the lock. The door creaked open and the taller of Lasse's assistants stood in the doorway, a gun in his hand, the bright bruise on his forehead still showing where Linda had hit him with the spade.

"You!" he said to Linda. "Come on." Casting a glance back at the two girls, she followed him. He held her arm in a crushing grip as he locked the door.

"Don't want you getting away again," he said in a low voice, shooting her a mean glance.

Releasing her, he pressed the gun to her back and forced her downstairs. In the hall, Lasse and Raakel were waiting. Raakel caught Linda's gaze and held it as she came down the stairs. She looked pale and frightened and her stare gave Linda a sense of foreboding. She seemed to be trying to communicate something to Linda that she was unable to put into words. Digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands, Linda forced herself to stay calm and keep a clear head.

"We're going for a little walk," said Lasse in a voice that gave nothing away. He nodded to the tall man, who seized Linda's wrists and handcuffed them together. Without a word, the man grasped her arm and pulled her out the front door. Lasse and Raakel followed behind. They took a path through the trees and across the fields. Several times Linda stumbled in the snow and was hauled to her feet again by her minder. All four walked in perfect silence.

Out here all sound seemed muffled by the snow. White fields stretched on as far as the eye could see, broken only by occasional hedgerows and groups of trees. Not another soul could be seen in the monochrome landscape. The emptiness and silence, and facing the winter chill without her jacket, made Linda shudder.

* * *

"There! There it is!" shouted Wallander.

Stefan swung the car into a tight turn and they bounced down the rough track that led to the Bergman Stud, the rest of the convoy following close behind. Reaching the stable yard they skidded to a halt and leapt from the car.

Within seconds it seemed that the entire site was filled with police. The armed response unit began a sweep of the stable buildings. Finding nothing, they continued on to the buildings behind the yard. Stefan made to run after them, but Wallander held him back.

"Stefan, let them do their jobs," he reprimanded. The last thing he needed was for his young colleague to put himself at risk.

They waited. Stefan glanced around wildly, desperate for any clue to Linda's whereabouts. Holgersson was on the radio; another unit was on its way to back them up.

A yell went up from the farmhouse behind the stable. Stefan glanced at Wallander and, when the older man gave him a nod, took to his heels. Rounding the stable block he saw that the armed officers had surrounded the house. The front door had been forced and two of the officers were restraining a thuggish looking man. He hurried to them.

"Where is she? What have you done with her?" he shouted.

The man stopped struggling for a moment and looked Stefan up and down with narrowed eyes. Stefan pushed in closer, until their faces were almost touching.

"Come on, tell me where she is!" Even to him his voice sounded hoarse and strained.

The man said nothing. Instead he spat in Stefan's face. Immediately, the two restraining officers were on top of him, pushing him to the ground, while Svartman and another uniformed officer handcuffed him. Stefan wiped his face with his sleeve. Wallander had caught up with him.

"Check the house!" he ordered.

The two of them hastened into the building. The ground floor was deserted. Stefan ran upstairs, flinging each door open in turn. Nothing. He came to a standstill in the largest bedroom, his heart pounding in his ears. Where was Linda? For that matter, where the hell were Lasse and the other two girls that they knew he had with him? His stomach tied himself in knots as he considered the possibilities.

Panting, Wallander caught up with him again.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing at all."

The sound of light footsteps came to them from the floor above. Wallander stopped, staring up at the ceiling.

"The attic," he said. "Someone's upstairs in the attic."

They scrambled up the stairs to the top floor, finding the key still in the attic door.

"Hello?" Wallander called.

No answer.

Wallander nodded to Stefan. With his gun poised, Stefan unlocked the door and threw it open. From the far corner a girl screamed. The two teenage girls who they knew to be named Vira and Iryna were crouching by the opposite wall.

* * *

In the few moments that it had taken to get a couple of paramedics in from one of the ambulances waiting outside, Stefan had bolted back out of the house. The heavy that they had arrested was still saying nothing, but Lasse _must_ be somewhere. His car was parked outside the house and from the tracks in the snow it seemed as if no cars had left the farm that day. Stefan glanced round the farm buildings. Where was the man hiding now? It seemed that every time they got close to him he pulled another disappearing act. Rage welled up inside him and as he made his way back round to the front of the house he savagely kicked a rusting motorbike that lay on the ground. Stopping to get his breath back, he crouched and studied the tracks in the snow for a moment.

Wallander had been taking care of the two girls. As Stefan stared at the ground he wandered back to him, carrying something that he had taken from one of the girls. Stefan glanced up at him and he held out the garment that was in his hands.

"Linda's jacket," he said. His face was haggard.

"She's here somewhere," said Stefan, rising to his feet. "But where? Where has that brute taken her?"

Wallander shook his head. The two men stood in silence for a minute, looking round them. Suddenly Stefan gave a start.

"What are those tracks?" he said, pointing to several sets of footprints that wound towards the gate into a field.

Taking care not to disturb the tracks, they moved to examine them more closely.

"Three – no, four sets of prints," said Wallander. "Two of them were wearing heavy boots, the other two had lighter shoes on."

They stopped dead and looked at each other, both knowing that this was what they were searching for.

* * *

They had crossed several fields and come to a halt in a small hollow, surrounded by trees. Linda's minder had finally let her go. Her arm ached where he had grasped it. His grip was like being trapped in a vice.

A muffled shout reached them from somewhere over the fields. Lasse froze and listened, then relaxed. He took a gun out of his pocket.

"What are you doing?" Raakel's horrified voice echoed round the clearing. Lasse looked at her and smiled, then turned to Linda.

"I'm afraid this is where we part company," he said. "Having a police officer in our midst is a liability. It's also time to teach your lot a lesson about staying the hell out of my business."

"What do you mean?" Linda felt inexplicably calm. She knew where this was going and she knew she shouldn't be so composed when she was practically staring down the barrel of a gun. A great numbness seemed to have come over her, almost as if she had been drinking or was under sedation.

Lasse took Raakel's arm and led her close to Linda.

"I wanted you and all your friends from the CID to learn to keep your noses out of my business. I've got a good thing going here and I don't feel like having it shut down by the police."

"We'd have caught up with you sooner or later."

"Which is why I thought I would teach you all a lesson about meddling with me. That Inspector Wallander is your dad, isn't he? That should make him think twice in the future; not only losing a colleague, but his own daughter."

It was as if the bullet had already gone in. Linda closed her eyes and swallowed the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat.

"Don't do it. Please," she said. "I don't really care if you hurt me, but if you kill me it will destroy my dad."

"How sweet," said Lasse. He handed the gun to Raakel, who looked at him aghast.

"What are you giving it to me for?"

"You told me earlier you only talked to the police because they made you, right? So I want you to prove you're still on my side. You're going to shoot her."

Linda read the expression of utter shock on Raakel's face. The other woman sent an almost beseeching glance in her direction, as if asking for help. Time slowed to a crawl as they stood looking at each other.

"Come on, Raakel." Lasse's voice was insistent.

With shaking hands, Raakel pointed the gun at Linda. Linda shut her eyes. It seemed to her that however this situation played out, one or both of them would end up dead.

A shot rang out though the trees. Linda opened her eyes, astonished to find herself still alive. Before she had had time to process this fact, more shots were fired and she seemed to be surrounded by loud voices, shouting instructions. She could see Raakel crouching in the snow, her hand bleeding. Armed officers swarmed into the clearing. Linda barely had time to glance round at the chaos unfolding around her before was aware of someone grabbing her and dragging her back into the trees. She struggled, then Stefan's voice spoke in her ear.

"It's all right, I've got you. Come on, you're safe."

He pulled her into a hug and she leaned against him. Armed police officers swarmed around them. She was vaguely aware of her father's voice: he was shouting at Lasse, who was being held by two of the armed response unit. She had never been so glad in her life to hear anything.


	14. Chapter 14: Safety

_Chapter 14: Safety_

The daylight had faded long before they had left the stud farm. Once she had been seen by a doctor, and had stopped shaking, Linda had resisted her father's request to let the paramedics take her to the hospital. There was nothing wrong with her, she insisted. She just wanted to go home and sleep. She climbed into the car with Stefan and her father and they left for home. Holgersson had ordered all of them to go and get some sleep.

It was a quiet drive back from Simrishamn, interrupted only by the occasional ringing of Wallander's phone as he issued instructions to the team doing the mopping-up work at the stud farm, or tactfully avoided answering questions from journalists who had somehow found out about the incident. Another press conference would be held in the morning. The reporters and photographers could wait until then.

Linda relaxed back in the front passenger seat and looked across at Stefan. In a way it was as if she were seeing him for the first time. She knew now that he had fired the shot that saved her life, his shot knocking the gun out of Raakel's shaking hands before she could pull the trigger. How he had found the nerve to do it she would never quite fathom.

She remembered a conversation she had had with him once where he had boasted about his marksmanship.

"I had my own gun and was shooting when I was eleven," he had bragged. "I can hit anything within a hundred metres."

She hadn't believed him, of course. Not until now.

Stefan glanced up from the road ahead and smiled at her. She smiled back. Her father's phone rang again. For a moment she felt that she could convince herself that it had been a perfectly ordinary day in the life of a CID officer.

Stefan sat on the couch and smiled awkwardly at Wallander. Linda was asleep. The house was quiet. Already the two men were having difficulty believing that the day's events had really happened. Wallander opened a cupboard and retrieved a bottle of Scotch.

"I think we both need a drink, hmm?"

Stefan nodded and grinned. Wallander took two tumblers and poured a generous measure into each. He handed one to Stefan, then took the other and sank into an armchair. Holding his glass up to the light, he studied the golden whisky inside for a moment.

"This has been a troubling case and a difficult day," he said. "But we all came through it in one piece in the end."

"I'll drink to that," replied Stefan, taking a swig from his glass.

"Stefan?" Something in Wallander's voice made Stefan look up from his drink. "I wanted to thank you."

"What for?"

"For what you did out there when that woman was pointing the gun at Linda. We both know what the consequences could have been otherwise."

Stefan gave a self-conscious smile.

"She would do the same for me. Anyway, if anything had happened to her I wouldn't have forgiven myself."

"Nor would I. Thank you, Stefan."

They were both silent for a while, each thinking what a near thing it had been; how close they had come to losing someone they each cared a great deal about. With a sigh Stefan drained his glass. Wallander glanced up at him.

"Go home and get some rest, Stefan."

"I'd like to stay here and make sure Linda's all right."

Wallander shook his head.

"I'll stay here tonight. It's my turn now, don't you think?"

They laughed softly.

Wallander saw his colleague off in a taxi, patting him on the shoulder and waving goodnight, then returned to the house, where he lay down on the couch. Within five minutes a deep sleep had closed his eyes. He slept soundly for the first time in a week.

* * *

Linda walked into the station at exactly nine o'clock. Ebba, keeping watch as always at the front desk, was the first to greet her.

"Linda! So good to see you back, dear," she said, rushing out from behind her desk to hug her. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Thanks." Linda gave the older woman a smile and carried on through the building toward her father's office. Each of the other officers that she passed on the way acknowledged her in some way, either with a nod or a smile. When she met Nyberg, who was on his way out of the break room, he paused and patted her on the shoulder.

"Welcome back," he said.

Feeling a little self-conscious at being the centre of attention, she reached Wallander's office and caught him adjusting his dress uniform as he prepared for the press conference downstairs. He turned to face her as she entered the room, his face registering mild surprise at seeing her there.

"I didn't expect to see you here today," he remarked, combing his hair.

"Why not? There's nothing wrong with me."

"Are you sure?" Wallander stopped combing his hair and put a hand on her shoulder, an expression of concern on his face.

"Dad, I'm fine," she insisted. "Remember the talk we had the other day? I'm a big girl, I can cope with my job."

He nodded and patted her. He could tell that there was no point in arguing with her; after all these years she could read him like a book.

"There are a few things I need to do today," she continued. "For a start, I'd like to see Iryna and Vira."

"We've moved them to a safe house. I believe Henrietta's talking to them this morning." He paused and brushed some fluff from his jacket. "I suppose they'll want to go back to Ukraine after all this is over."

"I wouldn't blame them." Linda straightened her father's lapels and handed him a bundle of notes from his desk. "I also want to speak to Raakel."

"Why? She almost shot you."

"Yes, I know. I was there. There's a few things I need to ask her about."

"Well, if you're up to it, I think she's in the interview room with Stefan. He should be nearly finished with her by now."

Leaving her father to his press conference, Linda made for the interview room and put her head round the door.

"Is it all right if I interrupt?"

Stefan looked up and nodded to her.

"Yeah, go ahead. We were just about finished anyway."

He slipped out of the room. Linda sat in the chair that he had vacated and looked at Raakel, who returned her gaze evenly. She looked exhausted and her hand was bandaged where Stefan's bullet had grazed it, but Linda could tell that the fight had not gone out of her yet.

The two of them sat in silence for a few moments, before Linda spoke.

"How's your hand?"

"Sore. But I'll live."

"I just wanted to know something. If it had come to it, would you have shot me?"

Raakel frowned, then shook her head.

"I… don't know," she said finally. She shook her head again. "I really don't know."

Linda nodded.

"Hmm. I wondered." There was silence for a little while. Linda had figured as much. Fortunately, however, neither of them had had to die on this occasion.

"What are you going to do when all this is over?" she asked. "If you're worried about Lasse we can put you in a witness protection scheme."

Raakel smiled.

"No thanks. I'm going back to Helsinki, where I can make sure Lasse never finds me again."

She smiled at Linda, a wide, genuine smile that made her seem a lot different to the abrasive woman that Linda had previously known.

"Don't worry about me," she said. "I can look after myself and I can make myself disappear so that Lasse can't ever track me down, even if he wants to. I'll be fine."

Linda believed her; the woman had an iron will. She shook Raakel's uninjured hand and left. Stefan caught up with her on the way out. Together they set off to visit Vira and Iryna. Outside the station the sun shone and the air had lost its brittle chill. The snow had begun to melt.

* * *

It took the best part of two weeks for Wallander's team to unpick the details of the case, and it would take several months more before the immigration authorities finished their investigations.

The scale of Lasse Hallström's people-smuggling operation rivalled that of his dubious import/export business. As more arrests were made, more people talked and more details emerged to incriminate him. Lasse had smuggled girls from all over Eastern Europe and Russia and concealed them in properties that he had bought but that were ostensibly in his mother's name. Half a dozen raids resulted in the discovery of several young women who were in a similar miserable state to the girls who had been taken to Ystad.

Ylva Bergman was promptly arrested on her return from holiday. Although she claimed to know nothing about her son's people-smuggling and how he had used her stud farm while she had been away, she admitted her suspicions that his business had not been entirely legal. He had helped her fund her stud farm and had purchased property for her, but she was in the dark as to what he had actually been doing with the property.

As the days passed, the list of charges against Lasse grew longer. Once Wallander was satisfied that the man would go to prison for a long stretch, his concern turned once again to Lasse's victims. One by one, he placed their photos into the case file, looking intently at each one and finishing with Annushka. It was with Annushka that this had all begun. Her death had allowed them to uncover the sordid operation that had been taking place under their own noses.

Wallander studied the girl's photo once more. The Belarusian authorities had contacted her brother and grandmother, who had identified her and her ring from photographs. Wallander flinched a little at the thought of the two people who had cared most about Annushka having to see the photo that he held in his hand. Once more he wondered how he would react if it had been him and the girl in the picture had been Linda. He really didn't want to think about it.

Placing Annushka's photograph carefully into the file, Kurt Wallander felt that he had kept his promise to her. The man who had caused her so much misery was behind bars, and although this could never bring the girl back, justice had at least been done.

"You can rest peacefully now, Annushka," he said in a quiet voice. Closing the file, he slid it into his desk drawer. After pausing for a moment, he took out the framed photo of Linda and placed it back on his desk.

* * *

Henrietta's work in Ystad was complete. Having completed an initial investigation for the immigration authorities, she had been called back to her office in Copenhagen, where she would work on tidying the loose ends of the case and ensuring that the young women that Lasse had smuggled into Sweden were either returned home or given the correct permits to remain there. However, there was one more task to be completed first.

There was a knock on her door as she was clearing the office that had been hers for the previous few weeks. She paused in the middle of piling her things into a cardboard box and glanced up.

"Who is it?" she called.

The door opened a crack and Wallander put his head round. Henrietta stopped what she was doing and smiled at him.

"Come in, Kurt!"

"Are you sure? I can come back later when you're not so busy."

"No, don't worry, I'm nearly finished now."

Wallander sidled into the room, carrying a bunch of flowers. He looked at her a little sheepishly.

"These are for you. Thank you for the help you've given us on this case."

"I don't know that I was that much help to you. You were the ones who helped me and my department."

Wallander shook his head.

"Believe me, Henrietta, you were more help than you realised." He paused, glanced at his feet and continued. "Apart from anything else, I, er, appreciated your support when Linda… when Linda was missing. It meant a lot to me."

Henrietta smiled at him and took the flowers. She read the card that was attached to them and grinned. Wallander shuffled his feet.

"Why don't we go for a meal tonight?" he said. "It might be along time before we get to work together again."

Henrietta nodded.

"Yes, why not? I'll look forward to it."

"Good, so will I. By the way, you were right about Lasse having a boat. He's got one in the harbour at Simrishamn, although officially it belongs to…"

"His mother?"

"Yes. Hardly a surprise, really, is it? You were right about him, though."

They gazed at each other. Henrietta opened her mouth to say something, but before she could speak, Wallander's mobile rang. The resulting conversation was short and to the point. Wallander hung up and looked at Henrietta.

"They're ready. Shall we go?"

Henrietta nodded and the two of them left the office and walked to Wallander's car. It was a short drive to the safe house where Iryna and Vira had been staying. Petya, finally well enough to leave hospital, had stayed there with them last night and there had been a somewhat tearful reunion between the three girls. Today, however, Petya was returning to her family in Russia.

Linda and Stefan were already waiting at the house when Wallander and Henrietta arrived. Petya sat on the couch beside Linda, twisting a strand of her hair round and round in her fingers. Wallander thought how young and vulnerable she looked, and for a moment he was filled once again with rage toward Lasse for how he had treated her and the two other young girls, who were sitting opposite her in armchairs.

Petya struggled to her feet, her left leg still encased in plaster. Linda helped her up and handed her a pair of crutches that had been propped against the couch. Petya gave her a grateful smile and hobbled towards Wallander.

"Thank you," she said in Swedish, then she laughed. It was the first time any of them had heard her laugh.

"You see, Linda has taught me some Swedish!" she said, reverting to English. Handing her crutches to Vira, she hugged Wallander tightly, then in turn hugged Linda and Henrietta.

"Thank you," she said again. "If it wasn't for you I would have died, and my friends…" she cast a glance at Iryna and Vira, "…my friends would still be with Lasse."

Wallander nodded.

"Are you going back to Novogorod?"

"Yes. My mother and father are waiting to see me. They're very worried." Petya's thin face was grave.

"You'll be with them again soon," said Henrietta. "Our people and the authorities in Russia will make sure you have a safe journey and you get back to your parents."

The door opened, and Stefan looked in.

"They're here to pick her up," he said.

The group watched as Petya climbed into the car and said her goodbyes to Vira and Iryna. Henrietta spoke with the immigration officials in the car, confirming their destination and issuing them with instructions. Then it was time to leave. Petya waved to the small group as she was driven away.

"I'll miss her," said Linda.

Stefan patted her shoulder and for a moment they smiled at each other. Wallander raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

* * *

The wind whipped in from the Baltic Sea, rearranging Linda's hair into an untidy mess and almost blowing Stefan's scarf away. They were walking close to the water's edge, their feet occasionally splashed by the surf as the waves crashed onto the beach. Behind them, the sun was setting. Linda looked up at Stefan as he stared out to sea.

"So, how are things?"

Stefan's eyes flickered, then focussed on her face. He gave the slightly awkward smile he always gave when the conversation made him feel a little uncomfortable.

"All right." He glanced down, then looked at her again. There was a lot going on in his head. Perhaps eventually he would tell her all about it. "Yeah. Not perfect, but all right."

"Good." They walked on a few steps. She gave him a fleeting look out of the corner of her eye. "Listen, I was wondering…"

"Yes?"

"I was wondering if you wanted to come over tonight? We can have some wine and we can talk about… things."

He stopped and smiled at her.

"Sounds good."

On impulse she hugged him, and felt him hug her back.

"I never thanked you for saving my life," she said.

"I'd do the same thing again, you know I would."

Linda nodded and they gazed at each other for a moment, interrupted only by the sound of someone clearing his throat behind them. Looking round, they saw that Wallander had joined them.

"Dad!" cried Linda.

"I won't ask what that was about," he said dryly. He laid a hand on Linda's shoulder and patted Stefan on the back. "Vira and Iryna have arrived back in Ukraine, and this afternoon I had an email from Petya. They all seem to be doing well. Lasse is in court next Tuesday. The prosecutor's confident he'll go down for at least fifteen years." Seeing the relief on their faces, he nodded to them. "I was proud of you both, the way you coped with this case. I know it wasn't easy on any of us."

Linda smiled and took his arm. Together, the three of them walked along the beach, looking out to sea. The case was closed. The girls were safe, reunited at last with those who loved them.

Kurt Wallander had kept his promise.

**The End**

* * *

_A/N: Hopefully this ending flows alright with the rest of the story. I wanted it to have a happy ending, without being too sickly sweet. I hope I succeded! Now I've got this story finished I don't know what I'm going to do with my evenings... :)_


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